Spike (of course)
As a Spike fan, what's the first thing to do when you get a copy of Lorna Jowett's Sex and the Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan? Yup, you check the index and find that Spike has (no surprise) a huge number of entries ranging from 'accent' to 'and Wood'. (Stop snickering.) Well, if we're going to get double-entendres out of the way, Spike has 7-3/4" of column and, just because I know some of you will be wondering, Angel has less than 6-1/2". I chuckle but, yes, I digress. I actually looked up 'Spike, sexuality of' and immediately found this interesting -- and I think accurate -- description. In my view, it explains why he's such a rich source for creative fanfic, whether writers are doing slash, het, or platonic friendship.
Since his appearance in season 2, supposedly as a fill-in villain until Angel turned bad, Spike has become one of the most popular Buffy characters and one of the most frequently discussed in recent scholarship. This may be due to his many contradictions: Spike blurs boundaries between good and bad, "masculine" and "feminine," hetero- and homosexual, man and monster, comic and tragic, villain and hero. Spicer argues convincingly that "it is his very liminality -- the impossibility of consigning him to a predetermined gender category -- that empowers him in the Buffyverse, enabling him to navigate the complex gender inversions that mark a community oriented around a heroic, female Slayer."
I've enjoyed some of the other scholarly Buffy books I've read (two good ones are Jana Riess's What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide and Rhonda Wilcox's Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and am curious to see what Jowett has to say from a feminist cultural studies view.
ETA: Wilcox title.
Since his appearance in season 2, supposedly as a fill-in villain until Angel turned bad, Spike has become one of the most popular Buffy characters and one of the most frequently discussed in recent scholarship. This may be due to his many contradictions: Spike blurs boundaries between good and bad, "masculine" and "feminine," hetero- and homosexual, man and monster, comic and tragic, villain and hero. Spicer argues convincingly that "it is his very liminality -- the impossibility of consigning him to a predetermined gender category -- that empowers him in the Buffyverse, enabling him to navigate the complex gender inversions that mark a community oriented around a heroic, female Slayer."
I've enjoyed some of the other scholarly Buffy books I've read (two good ones are Jana Riess's What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide and Rhonda Wilcox's Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and am curious to see what Jowett has to say from a feminist cultural studies view.
ETA: Wilcox title.