Joss Whedon and the Myth of the Exceptional Woman

[shadefell]

Mirrored from Words, words, words, art..

One of the tropes Joss Whedon returns to over and over is The Exceptional Woman. In his narratives, this is a (generally very young, very physically small) woman who is the best ever at what she does without having to really work at it. It’s either a natural talent, or an unnatural one forced upon her against

Comments

[zinnea]

Very well said and I agree. A lot.

[shadefell]

A friend and I were trying to think of a main character in "Buffy" who worked hard and succeeded and changed because of their own effort and sweat and we came up with... Xander and his carpentry.

[zinnea]

I never watched more than a handful of episodes, I could never get the appeal. Even when people would tell me about it, honestly, my response was, "But WHY?" I seriously could never find anything entertaining about the show. I loved the movie, though. LOVED it.

I haven't watched his other shows and haven't really felt a need to. The way people describe them to me is enough to turn me off.

[shadefell]

I like a lot of his stuff, or aspects of it. It's part of why I write about him & his work, because I care about representations of women & other minorities in popular media in general, but also because I like his work but realize much of it is problematic and should be addressed.

[ext_1379681]

you have your Willow Rosenbergs (...) who may work at something but don’t need to work THAT hard because they are NATURALLY GIFTED.

Nonsense. Willow spends years studying magic, we see her practise with other more advanced magic users, we see her make a ton of mistakes because she's just not good enough, we see her suffer headaches and nosebleeds because she's not powerful enough. More importantly, it's not about talent or gift. In Buffyverse everybody can do magic, Buffy, Xander, Dawn, Giles, Anya as a human, Spike - all of those characters cast spells at least once on the show. Willow becomes better than them at doing magic because she works hear tuchus off.

also had a vast well of world-ending power deep inside her.

That's factually incorrect. Willow needed the power of an entire witch coven, the power Giles could also wield, to be able to raise Temple of Proserpexa, she wasn't powerful enough on her own.

Please, if you don't know the show well enough, at least do some research in the future.

[smills47]

It's true.

In my teaching days (the '70's) I once had a colleague, a senior female faculty member, who advised me to submit papers for publication using only my initials, as I would have a better chance of getting published if it wasn't known that I was a woman. It was good advice, too.

On the bright side -- I guess -- she had attained sufficient eminence that she didn't have to do that any more.