feminist community in BtVS
Every now and then I have thoughts about things. Sometimes I post them. This is one of those times.
While I'm on the subject of thoughts: azdak has written an interesting post about morality in the Buffyverse. faith_delivers, check it out! (And join mutant_allies! *g*)
Credits and disclaimers: This post is a version of the Buffy paper I gave recently. It is thus considerably more formal than most of my posts, although still pretty damn informal by most academic standards. It grew out of ideas I wrote about in posts on "Dirty Girls" and "Chosen". It also comes out of all the talking and writing about BtVS that I was doing with renenet and truepenny a couple of years ago, particularly during the summer between seasons 6 and 7.
The title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests a show with a single hero, as does the show's designation of Buffy as "the chosen one." A lot of academic critical commentary on the show has reproduced this emphasis on the individual by focusing on the figure of Buffy herself. But over the course of the series, the show has actually worked against that apparent individualism.
individuality, community, and feminism
Rhonda Wilcox has argued persuasively that within the Buffyverse "the choice to fight alone, while heroic, is also presented as wrong" ("Of Creatures and Creators: Buffy Does Frankenstein," Fighting the Forces, p. 7). Similarly, Anita Rose's reading of the Scooby gang's Season Four confrontation with Adam emphasizes that "the isolated Romantic hero must fail in the face of a technological society if he or she remains isolated" ("'Who Died and Made Her the Boss?' Patterns of Mortality in Buffy," Fighting the Forces, p. 141). As Wilcox and Rose suggest, Buffy offers an implicit corrective to masculinist and individualist models of heroism by insisting that successful heroism is always collective.
I want to develop these fairly familiar ideas about collective heroism by arguing that the nature of the group's collectivity changes over the course of the show. Early on, the Slayerettes begin to form what we might call an intentional family, notable for its feminist disregard for gender roles and its emphasis on shared power; this family grows and develops over the course of the series. In the final season, the show takes this principle still further: it attempts to create a community that extends beyond the bounds of friendship or family. I'm going to refer to these two types of collectivity as local and global, respectively.
The show's global community comes to exemplify the ideal of feminism articulated by bell hooks (especially in Talking Back and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center) and others: feminism not as a matter of individual rights but as a shared commitment to struggle against sexism and sexist oppression, a solidarity that extends beyond the small circle of people we know and love to include everyone who shares this commitment. By the end of the series, feminism is not only collective rather than individual, but political as well as personal.
community vs. hierarchy
At the beginning of the series, the Slayerettes are strictly local. Their small group is the most effective way of fighting evil that they've got. And besides being pretty good at fighting evil, the group is also an alternative to organizations like the Watchers' Council and the Initiative, both of which ostensibly exist to fight evil but usually cause more problems than they solve.
The show establishes early on that serious evil is always hierarchical and usually patriarchal. Evil doesn't have friends; it has minions. The Master heads the Order of Aurelius; Angelus bosses Spike around; the Mayor is Faith's father figure but also her boss; Adam is the product of the Initiative's militarism; Glory has, well, minions; Warren becomes scary when he stops being one of the Trio and starts treating Jonathan and Andrew as subordinates. By extension, hierarchical and patriarchal organizations - like the Watchers' Council and the Initiative - always turn out to be at least a little bit evil, even when they're supposed to be the good guys.
We get our first taste of this problem in the Watchers' Council, with its rules and regulations and its insistence that Giles treat Buffy as a subordinate to be commanded rather than a daughter to be loved. Buffy's rejection of the Council at the end of Season Three ("Graduation Day, Part 1" 3.21) is both a victory in itself and a necessary step towards her subsequent, more explosive triumph over the Mayor. In the Season Five episode "Checkpoint" (5.12), in which Quentin Travers and other representatives of the Watchers' Council show up to test Buffy before giving her information on Glory, Buffy once again rejects their attempts to control her, telling them that she will "continue her work with the help of [her] friends."
The WC and the Initiative do have a certain appeal, though; because of their size and their histories, they have power and resources that Buffy and her friends simply don't have. The Scoobies' local community allows them to resist and reject patriarchal structures, but only when they create a global community do they find something that might replace those structures.
We see the appeal of these structures in the first third of Season Four: even though Buffy has rejected the Council's patriarchal control, she still feels the need to be part of something larger than the Scoobies' local community. In Season Four, she is drawn to the Initiative not just because she is increasingly fond of Riley but because the Initiative is big and organized and seems efficient and has very cool toys. Riley himself seems to think of the Initiative as a kind of family, but if the Initiative is a family, it is certainly a dysfunctional one. More accurately, it is a series of hierarchies; Riley's friendship with Forrest and Graham parallel Buffy's friendship with Xander and Willow, but relationships within the Initiative are structured by rank as well as by friendship. In "The Initiative" (4.7), what begins as a friendly debate between Riley and Forrest ("You wanna use the girl I got a crush on as bait?") quickly becomes a conversation of unequals: RILEY: I said denied, agent.
FORREST: Did you just pull rank on me?
RILEY: You got a problem with that?
FORREST: No, sir.
The Initiative is organized, efficient, and effective at finding and containing demons, but it produces monsters of its own. Adam is, of course, the literal monster; but the Initiative also very nearly makes a monster out of Riley, whose inability to do anything other than follow orders is literalized at the end of the Season when he becomes subject to Adam's control. In Riley, we see the dangerous effects of participating in and perpetuating such hierarchies. Only his relationship with Buffy and his exposure to an alternative way of doing things finally enables Riley to resist - to cut out the implant that has rendered him helpless.
The Scoobies, in contrast to the Initiative, are a true collective. Buffy is the focal point of the group, and she usually does routine patrols by herself, but the other members have skills and strengths that she does not. When major threats arise, research is usually done together, and saving the world requires the whole team. The end of Season Four is, of course, one of the show's most dramatic representations of the value of collective heroism: only by literally becoming one with Willow, Giles, and Xander can Buffy draw on the power of the First Slayer and overcome Adam. Buffy may be the hand that actually fights the forces of darkness, but that hand gains its effectiveness by connecting with mind, heart, and spirit. As Buffy tells Adam, "You could never hope to grasp the source of our power" ("Primeval" 4.21); because Adam is a product of military hierarchy, the possibility of collective heroism is his blind spot.
But the rebellions against the hierarchies of the Initiative and the Watchers' Council are at this point merely iconoclastic. Buffy attacks particular manifestations of the institutions without building anything in their place, and the institutions themselves persist. The Initiative is supposed to be destroyed, but the military project that created it still exists, and in fact Riley rejoins them in Season Five to go fight demons in Central America ("Into the Woods" 5.10). Even the underground base itself, which was supposed to be filled in with concrete, is still around in Season Seven ("The Killer in Me" 7.13). The end of "Checkpoint" reestablishes Buffy's independence from the Council's interference (and, with the reinstatement of Giles' salary, even gets the system working for her to a limited extent), but the Council itself remains basically unchanged. Buffy's local community is able to neutralize these forces temporarily, but she has not yet been able to get rid of them completely, let alone replace them with a global community of her own.
local community: necessary but not sufficient
Buffy herself knows that she needs something more than her local community. The beginning of Season Five finds her asking Giles to "be [her] Watcher again" ("Buffy vs. Dracula" 5.1); she's trying to tap into the good elements of the Watchers' Council, to use their resources for her own purposes, on her own terms. In "Fool For Love" (5.7), she attempts to find out about Slayer history and to find out about her own powers and weaknesses; she goes to Spike because she needs information that even Giles cannot provide. The end of Season Five, particularly Joyce's death and Glory's threat to Dawn, pushes aside this part of Buffy's quest. She says, in "The Gift" (5.22), "I don't know how to live in the world if these are the choices - if everything just gets stripped away." This comment is a testament to her need to be part of something larger, something that can't just get stripped away. At the moment when she must decide what to do about her sister, going on living without that connection to Dawn feels impossible. We can quibble about whether or not Buffy's decision to sacrifice herself was a good one, but there's an emotional logic to it: the disconnection that manifests as catatonia in "The Weight of the World" (5.21) has simply shifted forms, not disappeared.
Because the Slayerette family structure is so important, separation from it or distrust within it can have disastrous consequences. Rifts within the group interfere with both the group's ability to fight evil and the stability of the individual members' identities, whether those rifts are caused by the distraction of a significant other, bad choices by family members, or outside interference. Particularly in the case of Buffy, prolonged dissociation from her community seems to dissociate her from herself as well: she becomes less and less like the Buffy with whom we're familiar. Although Season Six is not the only instance of Buffy's alienation from her community, it is certainly the most extended example of the unraveling of the Slayerettes' close-knit family. Spike is the most obvious symptom of Buffy's problems: she has sex with him because she feels disconnected from her friends. At the same time, she still feels the need to protect them - from the knowledge that she was in heaven, from awareness of her liasons with Spike, from the fact of her own continuing depression.
But Buffy is not the only one who feels isolated or who needs help. Willow refuses to acknowledge her tendency to misuse magic; Xander doesn't share his anxieties about his upcoming marriage to Anya; Dawn feels neglected and takes up stealing. Their struggles remind us that the Slayerette family is not merely Buffy's backup team or emotional support system; the family structure connects them all, and its collapse damages them all. Tara is unable to convince Willow to give up magic, as is Giles; only damage to Dawn makes Willow admit she needs help. The season finale, in particular, demonstrates that Buffy is merely one part of their family: Xander's love, not Buffy's Slayer power, keeps Willow from destroying the world ("Grave" 6.22). Buffy herself is occupied with the less dramatic but no less thematically important work of reconnecting with Dawn; the image of Dawn taking up a sword and standing back to back with Buffy as they prepare to fight foreshadows a great deal about Season Seven.
The Scooby friendships turn out to be pretty durable, surviving even the hazardous territory of Season Six. But their bonds are badly strained, and all of them suffer as a result. By showing us the limits of what friendship can do and the problems it can cause, even as the finale reiterates that friendship can sometimes save the world, Season Six sets us up for the need for something beyond friendship, for a solidarity much bigger than a single group of friends, however loving and powerful those friends may be.
From this point of view, Season Seven is an extended attempt to answer the question: what would a non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical global community look like?
going global: connecting beyond the personal
Willow observes in "Lessons" (7.1) that "everything's connected"; in "Conversations with Dead People" (7.7) Holden the vampire tells Buffy that he feels connected to evil, and Buffy responds that she herself is "not so much connected." Buffy is looking for a connection not just to her friends but to something bigger. What would it mean to be "connected" to good in the way that Holden is "connected" to evil? What we find in Season Seven is that this kind of community is difficult to build and difficult to maintain. As the leader of the potential Slayers, first Buffy and then Faith occasionally resort to dictatorial behavior because they don't know what else to do - they don't know how else to organize such a large and heterogenous group.
Forging a community of potential Slayers is particularly difficult because there's no model for such a community. Slayers share a tradition and a calling, but, under normal circumstances, they have no access to each other and cannot help each other. Slayers do constitute a group, but Slayerness has traditionally been serial rather than collective. Buffy's brief death at the end of Season One enables two exceptions to this rule: Buffy's relationships with first Kendra and then Faith. The possibility of Slayer community is cut off in both instances, first by Kendra's death and later by Faith's betrayal.
But we do have a few incidents that establish the possibility of lasting connection between slayers. One is the dream that Faith and Buffy share while they're both unconscious at the end of Season Three, in which Faith provides Buffy with crucial information about how to defeat the Mayor ("Graduation Day, Part 2" 3.22). [ETA: coffee_and_ink has pointed out that we don't actually have any proof that this is a shared dream, and that thus the scene might more accurately be read less as proof of an existing connection than as proof of Buffy's desire for such a connection.] Another such incident is Buffy's contact with the First Slayer in her dream in "Restless" (4.22). Like Faith and Kendra, the First Slayer is part of Buffy's Slayer family; she attempts to separate Buffy from her friends because she is jealous of the community they have built - the other source of Buffy's power, the one that enables Buffy's observation that "you're not the source of me."
In "Restless," Buffy tells the First Slayer "give me back my friends." As Season Seven begins, we find Buffy connected to much more than just her friends: she's dreaming about the deaths of potential Slayers she's never met. These dreams are our first clue to one of the season's most important themes: the necessity of building connections not just with the people we know and love, but with people we don't know and maybe don't even like very much, and yet with whom we have a choice and a commitment in common. (I don't mean to suggest that the widespread negative reaction to the Potentials - as underdeveloped and/or unlikeable and/or taking time away from the main characters - was something the writers did intentionally, but I do think it's interesting that none of those reactions do anything to undermine the thematic coherence of the season as a whole.)
Within the show, the connections among potential slayers are literally as well as metaphorically global: the dying potentials of the first two episodes are located in Turkey and Germany, and the ones who come to Sunnydale are from all over the world. The project of getting these girls to work together, or even talk together, is a daunting one; as we see at the beginning of "Touched" (4.20), the group has difficulty deciding how to have a discussion, let alone make decisions. Amanda's suggestion that they use parliamentary procedure is played for laughs, but the fact is that they do need a system for talking together rather than just following orders, and they don't know what that system might be. Buffy's local community has been undeniably effective for the past six seasons, but the past six seasons have been fights against what we might call freelance evil; faced with the thing that makes evil exist, the group finds that they need something larger and more organized. Just as a rocket launcher isn't going to take care of Adam, merely channeling the power of the First Slayer isn't going to defeat the First Evil.
The reason that drawing on the First Slayer won't work is that the First Slayer, with her emphasis on working alone, is the creation of the first Watchers' Council, who created the Slayer for their own purposes. What they have created is undeniably powerful, but it is a power that derives in a fundamental way from patriarchal control over and domination of the female body. In "Get It Done" (7.15), Buffy rightly rejects that power when it's offered to her by the First Watchers. But afterwards, she second-guesses that rejection because she still has no other source of power with which to replace it. Only later does she realize that, as she tells the Potentials, Willow is more powerful than all those men put together ("Chosen" 7.22). Together, if the potentials choose to be strong, they can break the Watchers' chains and become a true community.
In "Chosen," Buffy and Willow and the potentials change the rules. The Scooby gang broke away from the Council long ago; now they go to the root of the problem, the system the proto-Council created, and make a new system instead. The choice to be strong is not merely a personal choice; it is a choice to move beyond the personal, to be connected, as the montage of girls suggests, to people we may not even know. This shift is the logical culmination of the collective heroism the show has consistently represented and endorsed over the course of its run. Ultimately, the show takes us beyond mere resistance to patriarchal, authoritarian attitudes and structures, and offers a vision or a metaphor of the feminist community we might build in their place. The show does not give us a users' manual; we don't have a model for how this community will work or survive. And, as in the show's penultimate shot, we don't know what lies down the road ahead. What we do know is that, even in its first untested form, the feminist community of Slayers and friends saves the world from ultimate evil.
While I'm on the subject of thoughts: azdak has written an interesting post about morality in the Buffyverse. faith_delivers, check it out! (And join mutant_allies! *g*)
Credits and disclaimers: This post is a version of the Buffy paper I gave recently. It is thus considerably more formal than most of my posts, although still pretty damn informal by most academic standards. It grew out of ideas I wrote about in posts on "Dirty Girls" and "Chosen". It also comes out of all the talking and writing about BtVS that I was doing with renenet and truepenny a couple of years ago, particularly during the summer between seasons 6 and 7.
The title of Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests a show with a single hero, as does the show's designation of Buffy as "the chosen one." A lot of academic critical commentary on the show has reproduced this emphasis on the individual by focusing on the figure of Buffy herself. But over the course of the series, the show has actually worked against that apparent individualism.
individuality, community, and feminism
Rhonda Wilcox has argued persuasively that within the Buffyverse "the choice to fight alone, while heroic, is also presented as wrong" ("Of Creatures and Creators: Buffy Does Frankenstein," Fighting the Forces, p. 7). Similarly, Anita Rose's reading of the Scooby gang's Season Four confrontation with Adam emphasizes that "the isolated Romantic hero must fail in the face of a technological society if he or she remains isolated" ("'Who Died and Made Her the Boss?' Patterns of Mortality in Buffy," Fighting the Forces, p. 141). As Wilcox and Rose suggest, Buffy offers an implicit corrective to masculinist and individualist models of heroism by insisting that successful heroism is always collective.
I want to develop these fairly familiar ideas about collective heroism by arguing that the nature of the group's collectivity changes over the course of the show. Early on, the Slayerettes begin to form what we might call an intentional family, notable for its feminist disregard for gender roles and its emphasis on shared power; this family grows and develops over the course of the series. In the final season, the show takes this principle still further: it attempts to create a community that extends beyond the bounds of friendship or family. I'm going to refer to these two types of collectivity as local and global, respectively.
The show's global community comes to exemplify the ideal of feminism articulated by bell hooks (especially in Talking Back and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center) and others: feminism not as a matter of individual rights but as a shared commitment to struggle against sexism and sexist oppression, a solidarity that extends beyond the small circle of people we know and love to include everyone who shares this commitment. By the end of the series, feminism is not only collective rather than individual, but political as well as personal.
community vs. hierarchy
At the beginning of the series, the Slayerettes are strictly local. Their small group is the most effective way of fighting evil that they've got. And besides being pretty good at fighting evil, the group is also an alternative to organizations like the Watchers' Council and the Initiative, both of which ostensibly exist to fight evil but usually cause more problems than they solve.
The show establishes early on that serious evil is always hierarchical and usually patriarchal. Evil doesn't have friends; it has minions. The Master heads the Order of Aurelius; Angelus bosses Spike around; the Mayor is Faith's father figure but also her boss; Adam is the product of the Initiative's militarism; Glory has, well, minions; Warren becomes scary when he stops being one of the Trio and starts treating Jonathan and Andrew as subordinates. By extension, hierarchical and patriarchal organizations - like the Watchers' Council and the Initiative - always turn out to be at least a little bit evil, even when they're supposed to be the good guys.
We get our first taste of this problem in the Watchers' Council, with its rules and regulations and its insistence that Giles treat Buffy as a subordinate to be commanded rather than a daughter to be loved. Buffy's rejection of the Council at the end of Season Three ("Graduation Day, Part 1" 3.21) is both a victory in itself and a necessary step towards her subsequent, more explosive triumph over the Mayor. In the Season Five episode "Checkpoint" (5.12), in which Quentin Travers and other representatives of the Watchers' Council show up to test Buffy before giving her information on Glory, Buffy once again rejects their attempts to control her, telling them that she will "continue her work with the help of [her] friends."
The WC and the Initiative do have a certain appeal, though; because of their size and their histories, they have power and resources that Buffy and her friends simply don't have. The Scoobies' local community allows them to resist and reject patriarchal structures, but only when they create a global community do they find something that might replace those structures.
We see the appeal of these structures in the first third of Season Four: even though Buffy has rejected the Council's patriarchal control, she still feels the need to be part of something larger than the Scoobies' local community. In Season Four, she is drawn to the Initiative not just because she is increasingly fond of Riley but because the Initiative is big and organized and seems efficient and has very cool toys. Riley himself seems to think of the Initiative as a kind of family, but if the Initiative is a family, it is certainly a dysfunctional one. More accurately, it is a series of hierarchies; Riley's friendship with Forrest and Graham parallel Buffy's friendship with Xander and Willow, but relationships within the Initiative are structured by rank as well as by friendship. In "The Initiative" (4.7), what begins as a friendly debate between Riley and Forrest ("You wanna use the girl I got a crush on as bait?") quickly becomes a conversation of unequals: RILEY: I said denied, agent.
FORREST: Did you just pull rank on me?
RILEY: You got a problem with that?
FORREST: No, sir.
The Initiative is organized, efficient, and effective at finding and containing demons, but it produces monsters of its own. Adam is, of course, the literal monster; but the Initiative also very nearly makes a monster out of Riley, whose inability to do anything other than follow orders is literalized at the end of the Season when he becomes subject to Adam's control. In Riley, we see the dangerous effects of participating in and perpetuating such hierarchies. Only his relationship with Buffy and his exposure to an alternative way of doing things finally enables Riley to resist - to cut out the implant that has rendered him helpless.
The Scoobies, in contrast to the Initiative, are a true collective. Buffy is the focal point of the group, and she usually does routine patrols by herself, but the other members have skills and strengths that she does not. When major threats arise, research is usually done together, and saving the world requires the whole team. The end of Season Four is, of course, one of the show's most dramatic representations of the value of collective heroism: only by literally becoming one with Willow, Giles, and Xander can Buffy draw on the power of the First Slayer and overcome Adam. Buffy may be the hand that actually fights the forces of darkness, but that hand gains its effectiveness by connecting with mind, heart, and spirit. As Buffy tells Adam, "You could never hope to grasp the source of our power" ("Primeval" 4.21); because Adam is a product of military hierarchy, the possibility of collective heroism is his blind spot.
But the rebellions against the hierarchies of the Initiative and the Watchers' Council are at this point merely iconoclastic. Buffy attacks particular manifestations of the institutions without building anything in their place, and the institutions themselves persist. The Initiative is supposed to be destroyed, but the military project that created it still exists, and in fact Riley rejoins them in Season Five to go fight demons in Central America ("Into the Woods" 5.10). Even the underground base itself, which was supposed to be filled in with concrete, is still around in Season Seven ("The Killer in Me" 7.13). The end of "Checkpoint" reestablishes Buffy's independence from the Council's interference (and, with the reinstatement of Giles' salary, even gets the system working for her to a limited extent), but the Council itself remains basically unchanged. Buffy's local community is able to neutralize these forces temporarily, but she has not yet been able to get rid of them completely, let alone replace them with a global community of her own.
local community: necessary but not sufficient
Buffy herself knows that she needs something more than her local community. The beginning of Season Five finds her asking Giles to "be [her] Watcher again" ("Buffy vs. Dracula" 5.1); she's trying to tap into the good elements of the Watchers' Council, to use their resources for her own purposes, on her own terms. In "Fool For Love" (5.7), she attempts to find out about Slayer history and to find out about her own powers and weaknesses; she goes to Spike because she needs information that even Giles cannot provide. The end of Season Five, particularly Joyce's death and Glory's threat to Dawn, pushes aside this part of Buffy's quest. She says, in "The Gift" (5.22), "I don't know how to live in the world if these are the choices - if everything just gets stripped away." This comment is a testament to her need to be part of something larger, something that can't just get stripped away. At the moment when she must decide what to do about her sister, going on living without that connection to Dawn feels impossible. We can quibble about whether or not Buffy's decision to sacrifice herself was a good one, but there's an emotional logic to it: the disconnection that manifests as catatonia in "The Weight of the World" (5.21) has simply shifted forms, not disappeared.
Because the Slayerette family structure is so important, separation from it or distrust within it can have disastrous consequences. Rifts within the group interfere with both the group's ability to fight evil and the stability of the individual members' identities, whether those rifts are caused by the distraction of a significant other, bad choices by family members, or outside interference. Particularly in the case of Buffy, prolonged dissociation from her community seems to dissociate her from herself as well: she becomes less and less like the Buffy with whom we're familiar. Although Season Six is not the only instance of Buffy's alienation from her community, it is certainly the most extended example of the unraveling of the Slayerettes' close-knit family. Spike is the most obvious symptom of Buffy's problems: she has sex with him because she feels disconnected from her friends. At the same time, she still feels the need to protect them - from the knowledge that she was in heaven, from awareness of her liasons with Spike, from the fact of her own continuing depression.
But Buffy is not the only one who feels isolated or who needs help. Willow refuses to acknowledge her tendency to misuse magic; Xander doesn't share his anxieties about his upcoming marriage to Anya; Dawn feels neglected and takes up stealing. Their struggles remind us that the Slayerette family is not merely Buffy's backup team or emotional support system; the family structure connects them all, and its collapse damages them all. Tara is unable to convince Willow to give up magic, as is Giles; only damage to Dawn makes Willow admit she needs help. The season finale, in particular, demonstrates that Buffy is merely one part of their family: Xander's love, not Buffy's Slayer power, keeps Willow from destroying the world ("Grave" 6.22). Buffy herself is occupied with the less dramatic but no less thematically important work of reconnecting with Dawn; the image of Dawn taking up a sword and standing back to back with Buffy as they prepare to fight foreshadows a great deal about Season Seven.
The Scooby friendships turn out to be pretty durable, surviving even the hazardous territory of Season Six. But their bonds are badly strained, and all of them suffer as a result. By showing us the limits of what friendship can do and the problems it can cause, even as the finale reiterates that friendship can sometimes save the world, Season Six sets us up for the need for something beyond friendship, for a solidarity much bigger than a single group of friends, however loving and powerful those friends may be.
From this point of view, Season Seven is an extended attempt to answer the question: what would a non-patriarchal, non-hierarchical global community look like?
going global: connecting beyond the personal
Willow observes in "Lessons" (7.1) that "everything's connected"; in "Conversations with Dead People" (7.7) Holden the vampire tells Buffy that he feels connected to evil, and Buffy responds that she herself is "not so much connected." Buffy is looking for a connection not just to her friends but to something bigger. What would it mean to be "connected" to good in the way that Holden is "connected" to evil? What we find in Season Seven is that this kind of community is difficult to build and difficult to maintain. As the leader of the potential Slayers, first Buffy and then Faith occasionally resort to dictatorial behavior because they don't know what else to do - they don't know how else to organize such a large and heterogenous group.
Forging a community of potential Slayers is particularly difficult because there's no model for such a community. Slayers share a tradition and a calling, but, under normal circumstances, they have no access to each other and cannot help each other. Slayers do constitute a group, but Slayerness has traditionally been serial rather than collective. Buffy's brief death at the end of Season One enables two exceptions to this rule: Buffy's relationships with first Kendra and then Faith. The possibility of Slayer community is cut off in both instances, first by Kendra's death and later by Faith's betrayal.
But we do have a few incidents that establish the possibility of lasting connection between slayers. One is the dream that Faith and Buffy share while they're both unconscious at the end of Season Three, in which Faith provides Buffy with crucial information about how to defeat the Mayor ("Graduation Day, Part 2" 3.22). [ETA: coffee_and_ink has pointed out that we don't actually have any proof that this is a shared dream, and that thus the scene might more accurately be read less as proof of an existing connection than as proof of Buffy's desire for such a connection.] Another such incident is Buffy's contact with the First Slayer in her dream in "Restless" (4.22). Like Faith and Kendra, the First Slayer is part of Buffy's Slayer family; she attempts to separate Buffy from her friends because she is jealous of the community they have built - the other source of Buffy's power, the one that enables Buffy's observation that "you're not the source of me."
In "Restless," Buffy tells the First Slayer "give me back my friends." As Season Seven begins, we find Buffy connected to much more than just her friends: she's dreaming about the deaths of potential Slayers she's never met. These dreams are our first clue to one of the season's most important themes: the necessity of building connections not just with the people we know and love, but with people we don't know and maybe don't even like very much, and yet with whom we have a choice and a commitment in common. (I don't mean to suggest that the widespread negative reaction to the Potentials - as underdeveloped and/or unlikeable and/or taking time away from the main characters - was something the writers did intentionally, but I do think it's interesting that none of those reactions do anything to undermine the thematic coherence of the season as a whole.)
Within the show, the connections among potential slayers are literally as well as metaphorically global: the dying potentials of the first two episodes are located in Turkey and Germany, and the ones who come to Sunnydale are from all over the world. The project of getting these girls to work together, or even talk together, is a daunting one; as we see at the beginning of "Touched" (4.20), the group has difficulty deciding how to have a discussion, let alone make decisions. Amanda's suggestion that they use parliamentary procedure is played for laughs, but the fact is that they do need a system for talking together rather than just following orders, and they don't know what that system might be. Buffy's local community has been undeniably effective for the past six seasons, but the past six seasons have been fights against what we might call freelance evil; faced with the thing that makes evil exist, the group finds that they need something larger and more organized. Just as a rocket launcher isn't going to take care of Adam, merely channeling the power of the First Slayer isn't going to defeat the First Evil.
The reason that drawing on the First Slayer won't work is that the First Slayer, with her emphasis on working alone, is the creation of the first Watchers' Council, who created the Slayer for their own purposes. What they have created is undeniably powerful, but it is a power that derives in a fundamental way from patriarchal control over and domination of the female body. In "Get It Done" (7.15), Buffy rightly rejects that power when it's offered to her by the First Watchers. But afterwards, she second-guesses that rejection because she still has no other source of power with which to replace it. Only later does she realize that, as she tells the Potentials, Willow is more powerful than all those men put together ("Chosen" 7.22). Together, if the potentials choose to be strong, they can break the Watchers' chains and become a true community.
In "Chosen," Buffy and Willow and the potentials change the rules. The Scooby gang broke away from the Council long ago; now they go to the root of the problem, the system the proto-Council created, and make a new system instead. The choice to be strong is not merely a personal choice; it is a choice to move beyond the personal, to be connected, as the montage of girls suggests, to people we may not even know. This shift is the logical culmination of the collective heroism the show has consistently represented and endorsed over the course of its run. Ultimately, the show takes us beyond mere resistance to patriarchal, authoritarian attitudes and structures, and offers a vision or a metaphor of the feminist community we might build in their place. The show does not give us a users' manual; we don't have a model for how this community will work or survive. And, as in the show's penultimate shot, we don't know what lies down the road ahead. What we do know is that, even in its first untested form, the feminist community of Slayers and friends saves the world from ultimate evil.