Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
qsmpc 1 (1) pp. 9–22 Intellect Limited 2016 queer studies in media & popular culture Volume 1 Number 1 © 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/qsmpc.1.1.9_1 Cael M. Keegan Grand Valley state University emptying the future: Queer melodramatics and negative utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer abstraCt Keywords Why should we still care about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, WB/ Buffy the Vampire UPN)? With more than two hundred scholarly articles, a yearly conference and an Slayer academic journal devoted to its study, Buffy has been well explored. Yet compared futurity to current broadcast programming, the show continues to stand out as an uncom- homonormativity monly radical mainstream text. Since Buffy’s last airing, realist images of the ‘good melodrama gay citizen’ have proliferated across US broadcast television, depicting lesbian and negativity gay characters as assimilated extensions of the bourgeois heteronormative family queerness and its consumer practices. In contrast, Buffy offers viewers a melodramatic and television queerly negative popular aesthetic of the sort that barely exists today. In this article, utopia therefore, the author returns to Buffy and its darkly queer hero, Willow Rosenberg (played by Alyson Hannigan), as indicators of utopian possibilities forgotten – but hopefully not yet lost. 9 QSMPC_1.1_Keegan_9-22.indd 9 10/16/15 8:24:52 AM cael m. Keegan We must make the intelligible appear against the background of empti- ness and deny its necessity. We must think that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces. – Michel Foucault, ‘Friendship as a Way of Life’ (in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth [Foucault 1997: 139–40]) Honey, I am the magic. – Willow Rosenberg, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Why, a dozen years after the broadcast of its concluding episode, does Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, WB/UPN) still matter? For those who study popular culture and are concerned about the queer subject’s evolving role in the American political imagination, Buffy remains a signature and compel- ling object. With an entire academic journal, a yearly academic conference and more than two hundred scholarly articles devoted to its study, Buffy is perhaps the most written-about televisual text in US history (Lametti et al. 2012), and for good reason: the show remains groundbreaking and continues to fascinate new viewers as well as academics, especially given its treatment of sexuality and gender. Despite the increasing frequency of LGBT characters and storylines on American television, no broadcast or cable network text has matched Buffy’s queer ingenuity. Over the last decade, television industry pressures for images of queer life to be simultaneously ‘responsible’ for sensitive straight audiences and ‘respectful’ to queer viewers have resulted in a homonormative aesthetic that repre- sents queer subjects as ‘anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (Duggan 2003: 50) while remaining largely de-eroticized and isolated from the queer community. More sophisticated, queer-centred texts have recently appeared: Orange Is the New Black (2013–, Netflix), Transparent (2014–, Amazon) and Sense8 (2015–, Netflix) all have queer or transgender lead characters who are in community with other LGBT people, but these media offerings are located behind streaming paywalls that isolate them from the bulk of the American viewing audience. The widening class stratification of today’s television market offers the ‘best’ queer programming only to viewers who can pay extra for their entertainment. This means that, historically speaking, Buffy stands out as an uncommonly radical and mainstream text – a crucial point at which the transformative potential of queerness was expressed in the popular medium of melodrama. Looking back, Buffy is the television programme that has done the most to introduce a wide range of American viewers to queer aesthetics. Let me be honest. As an academic in his mid-thirties who professionally studies and teaches queer and transgender popular culture, I have never quite gotten over Buffy. I realize that my attachment to the show carries the force of stereotype: that all feminist and gender studies academics of my cohort carry the stigma of being Buffy fanatics. And yet, something about the show contin- ues to exceed the boundaries of its cult status. This article – a sort of critical love letter to the text itself – is my attempt to explain why, in this paradoxical era of growing gay equality and staggering wealth disparity, Buffy remains so important, as a measure of queer possibilities abandoned. As we move into a world in which gay has become normal, in which queer politics have been insufficient to transform the basic institutions of our culture and in which neo-liberal capitalism has dramatically eroded our sense of a shared public, Buffy reminds us of a moment before such conditions crystallized. With all of its genre and broadcast foibles, Buffy nonetheless offers us a utopian, radically 10 QSMPC_1.1_Keegan_9-22.indd 10 10/9/15 10:05:13 AM Emptying the future queer popular aesthetic of the sort that barely exists today. In doing so, the show reminds us that the ideological conditions of being queer now, the feel- ing of intractability that attends this period of American history, are imposed and impermanent. It has not always been and need not always be so. There are other ways that the world might be, and we might be queer in it. This, for me, is part of the ongoing and queerly utopian magic of Buffy. In what follows, I discuss Buffy as an example of ‘queer melodramatics’, a radical, popular utopian style that thematizes resistance to the homonational- ist ideal of the ‘good gay citizen’ as it emerged at the turn of the millennium (Puar 2007: 39). Buffy defies the late-twentieth-century American visual politics through which queerness was rendered compatible with bourgeois heterosex- ual values and consumer capitalism, perhaps best typified by the contempo- rary situation comedy Will and Grace (1998–2006, NBC) and highly evident in more recent televisual texts such as Glee (2009–15, Fox), Modern Family (2009–, ABC) and The New Normal (2012–13, NBC). In contrast to those programmes, which portray their LGBT subjects as being isolated in static straight worlds, Buffy illustrates the power of queerness to reject assimilation and to insist on the reality and accessibility of alternative social formations. As a melodramatic text that eschews realist commitments and emphasizes the narrative power of affect, Buffy is able to forestall the identity politics of homonormalization and provide us with a very different, very queer future – an empty future that invites us to imagine something entirely new. Utopia, and everything after José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009) is perhaps the most powerful defence of utopian thought from a queer theoretical perspective. The work contains trenchant arguments for political idealism and the utopian imagination that prove productive in reading melo- dramatic texts such as Buffy, which often stress feeling over logic and emotional truth over plausibility. In it, Muñoz discusses how the romantic practice of queer world-building requires a simultaneous practice of world-destroying. He writes, ‘Queerness is essentially a rejection of the here and now, and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world’ (2009: 1). Muñoz argues for queerness as a ‘horizon imbued with potentiality’ (Muñoz 2009: 6) essential to the process of un-making what is insufficient in the social, and building anew. Queerness, for Muñoz, is valuable only to the extent that it is utopian; however, this utopian function must retain its critical and destructive power. ‘Utopia’, conceived of by Sir Thomas More in 1516, is an internally ambivalent term that can be translated either as ‘Eutopie’ (good place land) or ‘Utopie’ (no place land) (More 1912: 230). Throughout Cruising Utopia, Muñoz connects queerness to this secondary, negative function of utopia, through which other worlds might be insisted on by the refusal of the ‘here and now’. Muñoz discusses how, in The Principle of Hope, Volume 1 (1954), Ernst Bloch further disambiguates More’s concept by distinguishing between abstract utopias that offer only escapism and concrete utopias that are mate- rially grounded in political history and ‘understand what they are exploding’ (Bloch 1954: 146). Concrete utopias, Muñoz explains, are queerness’s project in the world – to build conscious pathways for turning away from ‘what is’ toward the horizon of ‘what could be’. Buffy presages these points: rather than capitulating to the abstract vision of a liberal ‘good place’, Buffy pursues 11 QSMPC_1.1_Keegan_9-22.indd 11 10/9/15 10:05:13 AM cael m. Keegan the negative capacity of queerness to create a ‘no place’ from which a very different future might unfold. Buffy is a melodramatic text that acknowledges and develops the destructive capacity of queerness, through which existing social structures might be undone and a concrete utopian vision might be cultivated. In Buffy, the utopian desire to end the world and the concomitant ability to save it are most clearly embodied in the show’s principal queer charac- ter, a powerful witch named Willow Rosenberg (played by Alyson Hannigan). Willow’s nickname, ‘Will’, indicates her power to effect narrative change according to Aleister Crowley’s definition of ‘magick’ as art form that brings reality into ‘conformity with the will’ (Husain 1997: 152). When in Season 6 Willow threatens to ‘burn the world to a cinder’ in rage over her murdered lover, Buffy introduces the possibility of a queerly un-made world as a form of utopian critical praxis. Overcome by the collective suffering inflicted on humans by society, Willow embarks on an apocalyptic mission to end the world itself. This gesture of queer anti-sociality ultimately reminds us why the world is worth reimagining through a melodramatic concern for the absent ‘balanced’ or integrated society (Schatz 1991: 153).