The Death Drive’s at Stake: Buffy:The Vampire Slayer

Abstract

A lthough most of the good titles have already been taken—Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Wilcox and Lavery 2002), “What Makes Buffy Slay?” (Udovitch 2000), “‘You Slay Me!’ Buffy as Jurisprudence of Desire” (MacNeil 2007), “Fans with a Lot at Stake” (Bloustein 2002), and even from the series itself, “Being A Vampire Sucks” (4003, “The Harsh Light of Day,”¹ I have come up with a title that captures what will be a predominately Lacanian reading of the series. This chapter and the next were first written in 2003 when the series ended, and they were meant to be included in the Youth Fantasies (2004) book, but never made the “light of day.” At that time I had watched all seven seasons and had the Buffyverse quite well in hand (somewhat “backwards” I must add, beginning with the first season after I had found a way into the series for myself, as shall be revealed). It seems apropos to revive them now, some five years later, recognizing that the scholarship on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer has not waned. Footnotes will update some of the discussion. In these two chapters, I have retained my idiosyncratic approach to youth by retaining the signifiers gurl/girl/grrl that I developed in Music in Youth Culture to address the question concerning the specificity of postfeminism. The exploration of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer is placed in the middle of Television and Youth Culture as an enfolded space that reaches out to the other two books, making the trilogy complete.