Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

qsmpc 1 (1) pp. 9–22 Intellect Limited 2016

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.

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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 represents 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 continues 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

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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 feeling 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 melodramatic 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

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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 character, 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). Later, it is Willow’s same tremendous magical abilities that will allow Buffy Summers (played by Sarah Michelle Gellar) to carry out the annihilation of the primordial vampire army by creating a Slayer democracy in which thousands of women are endowed with slaying powers. Buffy, therefore, defends notions of democratic sociality through its melodramatic deployment of queer negativity as a utopian force: Willow’s role is to liberate the future from becoming a monotonous exten- sion of the heterosocial present. The magical power of queerness to destroy ‘what is’ is also the ability to enact new relations of democratic futurity, to bring what ‘is not’ into being.

To desire what is not yet Like all popular American moving pictures, Buffy is an essentially melodramatic visual system (Williams 1998: 42). The programme’s intelligent and intentional use of the melodramatic mode enables it to effectively express gothic and fantasy elements in combination with other generic forms, such as the teen drama, the soap opera, the comedy, the musical and the coming-of- age story. Melodrama is important to politically invested analyses of popular culture because it is the aesthetic system through which the American nego- tiation of difference has found its most powerful popular expression (Williams 1998: 82). As a modern aesthetic stressing the political and psychological value of emotional, physical and narrative excess, melodrama allows for the representation of anti-realist elements that may signify various non-normative subjectivities, but that would otherwise be devalued as merely silly, phony or exploitive. In Buffy, magic is represented as a melodramatic force that provides the ‘assurance of emotional truth’ (Wilcox 2005: 193) even as it alters what is possible and permits narratively unlikely causalities. A melodramatic super- naturalism produces much of the programme’s complexity, portraying inner affective states that can result in physically legible consequences (invisibility, body swapping, transport to other dimensions, creation and elimination of desires, animation of dead bodies, transferral of powers, etc.). In Buffy, melodramatic deployments of the supernatural often function as signifiers for queer desire – for sex, but also for the unrealized possibilities of a utopian world. Magic is represented as a ‘visceral and emotional power’

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that does not merely replace desire in the show, but also is ‘contiguous with it, emerging from the same organic drives’ (Battis 2003). Through its melodramatic amalgamation of the supernatural with the queer, Buffy investigates and dismantles ‘the natural’ as a realist and heteronormative representational mode. As Sue-Ellen Case has noted, ‘The articulation of queer desire […] breaks with the discourse that claims mimetically to represent the “natural world”’, ultimately impelling us into the realm of the ‘other-than-natural’ where ‘new forms of being […] are imagined through desire’ (1991: 3–4). A text that supports the production of queer desire for the as-yet-unrealized, Buffy is a work of fiction that ‘explores the decay of the “normal” as it inter- sects with the fantastic and the grotesque’ (Battis 2003). Buffy’s staging of the world’s utopian destruction and reimagination converges specifically on its starring queer character, Willow (or ‘Will’), a name evoking both mutability and force. Throughout its concluding four seasons, Buffy featured Willow as a central and romantically involved queer character, an event then unprecedented on US broadcast television. Willow is special not only for her early articulation of televised queer desire but also because this desire is expressed as a powerful negativity that resists the homonormativity, consumer capitalism and respectability politics that had begun to domi- nate popular LGBT images in the late 1990s. The implicit threat of Willow’s queerness is especially evident in her flouting of the natural laws of life and death: she secretly points Dawn in the direction of resurrection spells after her mother dies, raises Buffy from the grave and finally attempts and fails to resur- rect Tara (Beirne 2004). These acts display a queer desire that ‘punctures the life/death and generative/destructive bipolarities that enclose the heterosexist notion of being’ (Case 1991: 4). Willow’s radical queer desire suggests that Buffy appeared at a hegemonically contentious moment in American culture, when the possibilities for queer representation on US broadcast television had not yet become stagnated by the rise of identity politics and the demand for ‘positive’ homonormative images. Buffy continually challenges the liberal humanist ideal of a rational, unified self through its oscillations between good and evil, the human and the fantastic, the normal and the monstrous, and it is Willow – a queer witch of immense supernatural power – who ‘lives most precariously in the liminal spaces in between’ (Driver 2007: 70). Buffy scholarship written during the show’s initial broadcast run often contests the political value of equating queer desire with the supernatural: previous academic discussion of Buffy has criticized the programme for an assumedly heterosexist unwillingness to ‘show’ the viewing audience queer sex. It has also been argued that Willow’s reticence to label herself as a lesbian implies that her character lacks a perceivable, coherent sexuality (Beirne 2004). Such scholarship tends to conflate realist representations of queer identity with ‘positive’ queer characterization, criticizing the show’s ‘queer sex is magic’ transliteration as a disembodied, non-realist form of signification. For example, Rebecca Beirne (2004) claims that the ‘ethereal, desexualized, magical realm’ of queer desire on Buffy ‘removes the erotic tension crucial to a queer reading of a text’. Farah Mendlesohn asserts that the supernatural representation of sex between Willow and Tara – which includes orgasmic spells, the magical deflowering of a rose and ecstatic levitation as a signi- fier for oral sex – ‘actually undercuts a queer reading of Willow at all […] by neutralizing her sexuality and then by rechannelling thoughts of lesbian relationships in a safe direction’ (2002: 59). Edwina Bartlem (2003) states that the conflation, while amusing, ‘is problematic because it leaves a large space for

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reading this desire as being unnatural, frightening and potentially evil’. Such claims are, unfortunately, part of a wider process by which queer subjectivities are normalized, fixed and commercialized through realist and identitarian modes of representation and criticism. More than a decade after Buffy’s conclusion, I would argue in retrospect that this ‘large space’ within which the negative potentiality of Willow’s queer desire slips the bonds of realist signification and its sentimental snares is precisely what makes Buffy a queerly radical text: Buffy’s melodramatic representation of supernatural queer desire allowed the show to refuse the normative identity politics of gay and lesbian representation while also surviving in a hostile network environment. Clearly, supernatural sexuality is an aesthetic strategy through which Buffy’s writers attempted to introduce transgres- sive content while simultaneously avoiding censorship issues (Bartlem 2003; Driver 2007: 77). Yet, as Susan Driver has noted, this non-realist formula- tion also provides an uncommon framework that allows Willow to become queer ‘slowly and patiently, beyond the certainty of linear progression and finality’ (2007: 63). In resisting the common tropes established to represent queer identity on television – the chaste kiss, the suicidal teen, the coming- out narrative – Buffy ‘challenges its own programmed structure as a media vehicle that must obey certain popular themes – it may obey them, but not transparently, and not without visual and narrative resistance’ (Battis 2003).

Staying (with) the dark Like other texts exploring the dramatic capacity of feeling, Buffy features a number of traditionally melodramatic conceits, the most obvious of which is perhaps ‘situation’. A device traditionally employed to relieve the teleologi- cal and verisimilitudinal pressures of realist narrativity, situation opens up a text’s thematic and dramatic potential while allowing that text the heightened emotional register, hyperbolic Manichean clashes and jumbled plotting char- acteristic of sophisticated melodramatic aesthetics. Situation provides stirring climaxes at the same time that it allows ongoing and complex interpersonal conflicts and crises of emotion. For example, Lea Jacobs claims that ‘situation’ denotes a ‘striking and exciting incident that momentarily arrests narrative action while the characters encounter a powerful new circumstance’ (quoted in Singer 2001: 41). Ben Singer also notes that melodramatic narrative arcs tend to represent characters’ plights of feeling as ‘situational’ in that they span relatively long periods in each character’s personal history. They are not merely ‘thrills’, and are not quickly resolved, but rather are worked over and over in different and developing ways (Singer 2001: 42). Situation is therefore crucial to melodrama’s ability to present a totally personalized and subjective world, in which the environmental structures of a narrative reflect a character’s inner emotional state. The non-classical textual structures commonly featured in melodrama – outrageous coincidence, implausibility, convoluted plotting, deus ex machina resolutions, tangled episodic strings of action, generally lax cause/effect relationships – tend to privilege the dramatic potential of situation over the more stringent restrictions of realist diegesis (Singer 2001: 46). As a televisual melodrama, Buffy employs situation in a number of ways, both generically and specifically. The show displays situation in its lengthy and complex character arcs as well as in its use of action and physical peril to produce dramatic climaxes. Specifically, however, Buffy deploys situation to represent a ‘situated world’ in which the supernatural exists and is capable

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of altering reality in ways that fundamentally expand that world’s narrative and aesthetic possibilities. Through its situated suspension of realism, Buffy portrays a hermetic setting – Sunnydale, California – that is suffused with the negative potential of magic to revoke narrative formalisms. One of the most important possibilities that this supernatural situation creates is the potential for the emergence of queer desire in the material world and its power to un-make hegemonic reality. For example, the utter destruction of Sunnydale in the programme’s conclusion, made possible by Willow as a queerly transformative nexus, represents what Michael Warner has described as a ‘queer planet’, a space that asserts the ‘necessarily and desirably queer nature of the world’ (1993: xxi). The use of situation to introduce the possibility of a queer world is not specific to Buffy alone. Other television melodramas from the millennial period, such as Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001, syndication), Queer as Folk (2000–05, Showtime) and The L Word (2004–09, Showtime), also use situation to sustain queer difference in a generally heteronormative medium. The surprising frequency of situation as a tactic for televisual portrayal of queerness in this period illustrates the dramatic shift toward homonormative realism in the time since the millennial era. However, the narrative deployment of situation varies widely across millennial texts. Both The L Word and Queer as Folk present sealed subcultural environments that repulse penetration, environments in which homophobia is carried by outsiders and psychological strife poses the greatest threat to social integration. In terms of genre, these shows function as family melodramas: melodramas of interiority in which conflict plays out within characters through the internal structures of pathos and moral antinomy (Singer 2001: 53). Xena, however, uses situation to introduce a picaresque motif that resists the feminizing order of domestic space, depicting a completely public and episodic world. This externally situated world provides Xena with a territory in which to display her phenom- enal strength and agility without fear of judgement by, or expulsion from, a heteronormative community. As a generically ‘sensational’ melodrama, Xena elaborates and resolves all of its conflicts through morally polarized, corporeal clashes between good and evil. Unlike The L Word and Queer as Folk, Xena is a melodrama of exteriority, in which everything happens ‘on the outside’ (Singer 2001: 53). Arguably, Buffy features the most complex and intelligent use of situated melodramatics to signify queerness in US television history. The show is unlike the three above-mentioned programmes in that it applies situation to sustain an innovative combination of melodramatic interiority and exteriority, in which affect is treated as equivalent to, and as material as, physical reality. In Buffy, situation renders affects not just visible but also ‘tangible and concrete’ (Cvetkovich 1992: 24): emotions have the power to emerge materi- ally into the world ‘like magic’, moving from affect into effect. Contrary to much previous critical analysis, Buffy’s situated articulation of supernatural queerness is not a simple capitulation to stereotypes; instead, it is a power as real as gravity, one that permits the show to carry out its grand drama of utopian realization by providing a queer means to destroy the world, and thereby to reimagine it. It is situation that allows the show to stay with and develop Willow’s queer negativity, to resist sentimentally resolving it into a naive prosocial affect in the service of assimilation. Instead, her queerly negative powers are worked on and refined, channelled toward the un-making of the ‘chosen one’ Slayer logic and the redistribution of that heroic legacy to

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countless other Slayers. Situation draws out the transformative possibilities embedded in Willow’s dark affects, insisting that queer desire can alter and even obliterate historical and social formations. Televisual media normally preclude the expression of queer desire through heteronormative arrangements of language and social contact, mimetically reproducing the aesthetic boundaries of liberal realism. In this regard, television programming ‘corresponds to a perpetuation of the bourgeois public sphere’ (Negt and Kluge 1993: 102), assuming that liberal sociality is regulated by rational discourse between discrete, enfranchised individuals. This assump- tion tends to privilege white, cis-heteropatriarchal bodies and to restrict the recognition of racialized, sexualized, gendered and classed positions. Through its deployment of situation, Buffy resists this social model, providing an alter- nate, melodramatic framework that represents the supernatural as a queer form of contact that bypasses the strictures of liberal autonomy and rational discourse. Magic on Buffy suggests utopian modes of sociality that negatively gesture beyond the limits of the world’s narrative borders, opening a space through which disavowed forms of feeling may be acknowledged. Such suggestion of new forms of social contact through the melodramatic deployment of the queerly supernatural is thus one of the programme’s major political projects. Willow’s refusal to surrender to the terms of rational autonomy draws the routinely denied possibilities of queerness – including the end of the known world – into utopian possibility.

Don’t speak The emergence of Willow’s queer negativity is first suggested in Buffy’s 50th episode, ‘Doppelgangland’ (Episode 3.16), in which a vampiric queer double of Willow appears, and it finds fuller expression in the 66th episode, ‘Hush’ (Episode 4.10), which garnered the show’s only Emmy nomination. ‘Hush’ is important because it presents a point at which the programme explicitly thematizes queer desire as a non-realist form of anti-sociality. The episode is a brilliant, almost entirely silent piece of melodrama within which the queer relationship between Willow Rosenberg and Tara Maclay (played by Amber Benson) is first established. In ‘Hush’, human speech has been removed from Sunnydale’s social body by magic. The complete absence of dialogue throughout 27 minutes of the episode demonstrates the importance of melodramatic conventionality to the programme’s narrative structure: situation provides a suspension of rational sociality as enforced by language. In the DVD commentary for the episode, creator Joss Whedon mentions that he wrote ‘Hush’ as a meditation on the restrictions of rational discourse, noting, ‘Once we stop talking, we start communicating’ (quoted in Wilcox 2005: 161). The episode is almost entirely concerned with the limiting functions of various languages – commerce, law, patriarchal authority, heterosexuality – that are supplanted by the eruption of an antisocial, queer monstrosity. Sunnydale becomes a situated utopian ‘no place’ that supports the emergence of Willow’s queer desire, a supernaturally negative potential that will only ever be partially representable outside of that antisocial suspension. In this manner, Buffy preserves the utopian force of queer difference to un-make social relations, rendering Willow’s queerness as always partly inaccessible in language and forestalling the realist impulse to fix and consume it as a visual commodity. ‘Hush’ (1999) begins with a dream sequence in which Buffy is called to the front of her college class to display a kiss with Riley (played by Marc Blucas),

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her romantic interest. In the dream, language is melodramatically literalized: Riley says, ‘If I kiss you, the sun will go down’, and, as he kisses Buffy, the sun suddenly sets. Buffy then awakens with a start to realize she has fallen asleep in her psychology class. As the episode continues, difficulties with language begin to crop up: Xander (played by Nicholas Brendon) and Anya (played by Emma Caulfield) argue about Xander’s inability to express his feelings and his use of Anya for ‘lots of orgasms’; Willow attends a Wicca circle in which Tara first appears, but even though she attempts to contribute, Tara, who suffers from a stutter, cannot speak; Buffy resists becoming involved with Riley because she will have to lie to him about being a Slayer. However, Buffy is unaware that Riley is a member of a secret military demon-control squad, called the Initiative. As night falls, a group of dark-suited, effetely homoerotic and leering fairy-tale demons known as the Gentlemen arrive in Sunnydale. They do not speak and carry a small box that, when opened, sucks the voices out of every Sunnydale resident, initiating Sunnydale into a queer form of anti-sociality. When Willow and Buffy (who are college roommates) wake the next morning, they find that they and the entire Sunnydale population have been rendered suddenly speechless. They wander downtown to find that panic has broken out: people are crying and sitting in the middle of the street, most businesses are closed but the liquor stores are open and car accidents, fires and fights are proceeding uncontrolled by any sort of police force. In the ensuing effort to restore their voices, Buffy’s Watcher, Giles (played by Anthony Head), discovers that the Gentlemen are seeking seven hearts from seven victims, and they have stolen everyone’s voices so that no one can scream. Only a real, human scream can destroy the Gentlemen and prevent them from killing more Sunnydale citizens. That evening, Tara heads to Willow’s dorm room with the idea of casting a spell to restore their speech, only to be attacked by the Gentlemen. She and Willow are forced to flee to the dorm’s basement, where they ‘look each other in the eyes with perfect understanding’ (Wilcox 2005: 158) and merge subjectivities to telekinetically move a soda machine in front of the door. It is evident in their faces that this experience is one of self-shattered awe and ‘exploded limits’ (Bersani 2009: 24), in which queer desire appears with a frighteningly intense power to un-make their previously autonomous and socially embedded identities. The surge of supernatural energy in this scene quite obviously implies ‘an acknowledgement of the presence of desire’ (Bartlem 2003), which emerges from a place of queer negativity and is connected to the antisocial monstrosity of the Gentlemen and their curse. Meanwhile, Buffy and Riley meet up and join forces to destroy the remaining Gentlemen. Riley shatters the box holding the voices, allowing Buffy to scream, which causes the Gentlemen’s heads to explode. Order is restored to Sunnydale and college life continues as normal – with the exception that the queer connection between Willow and Tara, a tear in the heterosocial fabric of suburban Sunnydale, remains. Discussing the events of the night before, Tara tells Willow that she thinks Willow ‘has a lot of power’ and that she is ‘something special’. Interestingly, many of the previous problems with communicating through language have resurfaced; the incident with the Gentlemen appears to have alienated Giles and his lover, Olivia (played by Phina Oruche), while Buffy and Riley are faced with the fact that each has been leading a secret life. The episode ends as the two characters face each other in Buffy’s dorm room, not knowing what to say (‘Hush’ 1999).

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While some analyses of ‘Hush’ might interpret the stealing of Sunnydale’s voices as an act that allows confusion and violence to occur, a resistant reading might emphasize how the anti-sociality of such a situation – symbolized in the episode through the evacuation of law and the breakdown of the social hierarchy – also produces the conditions for the emergence of queer desire and the potential for a new, utopian relationality that proceeds from an un-making of the social. Although the silence instigated by the abduc- tion of the voices results in a great deal of chaos, it also opens up new modes of transformative communication between characters: Buffy and Riley enjoy a kiss that they previously shared only in Buffy’s dream; Xander and Anya are sexually reunited through not being able to speak; and Willow and Tara discover that magic has drawn them into an erotic relationship. Far from erasing the expressivity of the televisual text, the verbal silence of ‘Hush’ instead accentuates possibilities for connection through a suspended, melodramatic aesthetic that Buffy depicts as supernatural. The scene of Willow and Buffy wandering down a street occupied by a silent yet turbulently disor- dered society is an ideal illustration of how the rational discourse of heter- onormativity is, in reality, a repressive regime. While the effects Willow and Buffy experience in this scene are generally frightening in tone, the concomitant connection between Willow and Tara serves as a utopian wedge through which viewers might imagine the ‘end of the world’ as an opportunity to fash- ion new relations. This utopian wedge will widen throughout the latter half of the series, until Sunnydale cracks wide open and the show’s setting is emptied of all normative social structures.

Dark wills, dark works In the final seasons of Buffy, the threat and promise of queer desire form a melodramatic cycle that is crucial to the expression of a final, concrete utopian form, one that, as Bloch puts it, ‘understands what it is exploding’ (Bloch 1954: 146). The negative potential of queerness to disassemble the social and reimagine the world itself, enacted through the conduit of Willow’s darkening queer power, emerges as a dominant theme. In the 122nd episode, ‘Grave’ (Episode 6.22), Willow attempts to destroy the world after becoming imbued with intoxicating magic that allows her to connect to and ‘feel everything’ – a ‘terrifying collectivity of earthly pain, anger, and despair’ (Battis 2003). In the process, Willow transforms into Dark Willow, a vessel of supernaturally concentrated negativity bent on the destruction of reality by the endless suffering and sorrow of the terribly imperfect world (‘Grave’ 2002). For Dark Willow, ending the world means ending the suffering it contains, including her own anguish over Tara’s death. Rather than playing the role of the sentimental queer who dies in order to garner sympathy and be necro- politically assimilated, Willow will eventually rescue herself and everyone else through the destruction of the series’s narrative line. Willow’s dark- ness functions as the queer point of origin for Buffy’s utopian dreamwork: Dark Willow signifies the empty potential of a radically connective world that will later prove to be the Slayer’s greatest weapon. In the final few episodes, Willow’s apocalyptic power serves as the key to the defeat of the vampiric forces, enacting the beginning of what might be described as ‘queer time’, an alternative temporality that imagines the future ‘outside of those paradig- matic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction and death’ (Halberstam 2005: 2). Willow’s power will un-make and universalize

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the Slayer lineage, open the Hellmouth and destroy Sunnydale along with the vampire army. In ‘Grave’, the eschatological scene of Dark Willow’s desire to destroy the world imbues that same world with a new utopian futurity, a queerly empty futurity that arrives during the show’s conclusion. As Buffy and her younger sister, Dawn (played by Michelle Trachtenberg), realize that they have survived Dark Willow’s assault on reality, Buffy tells Dawn that she no longer needs to ‘save her’ from the world, that instead she wants to ‘show’ her the world – ‘There’s so much that I want to show you’. The two then turn to walk through a graveyard that now appears as an Elysian field, gazing in wonder at the lush vegetation and beautiful sky (‘Grave’ 2002). Dark Willow’s queerly negative attempt at the total destruction of the social produces a heightened sense of futurity that gestures at the possibility of a concrete utopia. During the series finale, ‘Chosen’ (Episode 7.22), it is Willow who again performs the negative labour of utopian possibility when she awakens the entire Slayer lineage to its mission, moving the show from the logic of a ‘chosen one’ to a new democratic vision that evacuates the singular heroic ideal. Buffy declares: ‘In every generation, one Slayer is born […] because a bunch of men who died thousands of years ago made up that rule. They were powerful men. This woman,’ Buffy points to Willow, ‘is more powerful than all of them combined. So I say we change the rule. I say my power should be our power’ (‘Chosen’ 2003). In the show’s concluding sequence, Willow’s supernatural body becomes the matrix for a new and queerly catastrophic articulation of the utopian imagination, one that upholds the vision of a purely democratic community even as it brings an end to the known world of Sunnydale and, with it, the text itself. In its pursuit of an empty future, Buffy presents queer negativity as a site through which the un-making of the world might be envisioned and enacted. The show’s utopian project draws on queerness as a space of dark possibility – a place where the world and its social relations might be inter- rupted so that its democratic potentials might be brought into the real. This dream is a dream for which the text is willing to sacrifice its own existence: in the show’s concluding scene, the known world of Sunnydale is destroyed in order to defeat the vampire horde. This queerly ‘backward’ dénouement (Love 2007: 4) – in which the end is a beginning – suggests that the destruction of the known world presents newly possible social relations that would normally remain unimaginable. As ‘Chosen’ rather ironically indicates, the end of the world – which Buffy and the Scoobies have been strenuously trying to avoid since the first season – is actually the beginning of something entirely new, entirely queer. The show ends with an open question, ‘What are we going to do now?’, that makes the entire plot a domestic prologue to the vast possibilities of a blank space. In its melodramatic insistence on the utopian rather than the pragmatic, Buffy’s conclusion deploys queer negativity to empty a future into which it might spill forward, toward the unknown.

What now? Why does Buffy still matter? Over the last several decades, a new articulation of the homonormative popular image has surfaced as a mechanism to meld previous forms of queer resistance with US imperial interests. As if by ‘magic’, certain LGBT identity positions are becoming widely incorporated into American articulations of nationalism and neo-liberal success. By turning

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to the ‘backward’ archive of queer refusal and negativity, of which Buffy is an excellent example, we can begin to outline the costs of such a welcome (Love 2007: 4). One of the major ideological effects of our post-millennial era is the suture of life chances to a very limited form of rational, autonomous self-management. The demand for ‘positive’ and ‘responsible’ queer images falls in line with the further elaboration of this intensifying disciplinary power, which has rendered alternative modes of living dark and unthinkable. Today, there is a widely held, abstract utopian belief that increased LGBT representation leads automatically to desirable social effects. American nationalism has recently begun to integrate LGBT people into its wishful notions of formal equality: queer subjects are invited to join the nation’s ‘will to empower’ (Cruikshank 1999: 1) under the inclusion- and tolerance-based rhetorics of pride (versus liberation) and equality politics (versus freedom). In cultivating resistance to the lure of neo-liberal ideology and its consumer address, queer people must commit ourselves to the unflagging scrutiny of naive utopian formations and their immensely romantic appeal. Buffy’s unapologetic insistence on the destruction and remaking of the world reminds us that ‘something is missing’ (Muñoz 2009: 1), emphasizing the power of queer negativity to reject insufficient futures and initiate us into concrete utopian worlds. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that rare example of what a radically negative, popular queer melodramatics might offer to the utopian imagination. The show rejects the dominant schema under which queer subjects are offered social integration, illustrating how queerness exceeds the abstract utopian claims of identity-based inclusion. On Buffy, the queer does not capitulate to the social; rather, the social is ended through queer transformation, clearing the way for something newer and more expansive. A superlative example of queer melodramatics, the show suggests that a concrete utopian vision becomes increas- ingly tangible as we harness the negative potential of queer affect to shatter, refuse, turn away from and ultimately un-make the heterosocial, capitalist imperative and its projected future. The melodramatic queer body is a site through which we might envision a utopian ideal that spurns the naive prom- ises of ‘equality’ proffered by assimilation. Buffy illustrates how the negative potential of queer affect renders the very field of utopian imagination possible, by insisting that ‘this world is not enough’ (Muñoz 2009: 1). The negatively utopian queer imagination detaches us from the now and delivers us into an empty field of possibility, where we can ask the all-important question: what are we going to do now?

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Bersani, Leo (2009), Is the Rectum a Grave?: and Other Essays, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bloch, Ernst (1954), The Principle of Hope, Volume 1, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Television. Case, Sue-Ellen (1991), ‘Tracking the vampire’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3: 2, pp. 1–20. ‘Chosen’ (2003), Joss Whedon, dir., Season 7, Episode 22, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 20 May, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Television. Cruikshank, Barbara (1999), The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cvetkovich, Ann (1992), Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Driver, Susan (2007), Queer Girls and Popular Culture: Reading, Resisting and Creating Media, New York: Peter Lang. Duggan, Lisa (2003), The Twilight of Equality? Neo-liberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy, Boston: Beacon Press. Foucault, Michel (1997), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, New York: The New Press. ‘Grave’ (2002), James A. Contner, dir., Season 6, Episode 22, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 21 May, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Television. Halberstam, Judith [Jack] (2005), In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York: New York University Press. Husain, Shahrukh (1997), The Goddess: Creation, Fertility and Abundance, the Sovereignty of Woman, Myths and Archetypes, London: Little, Brown. ‘Hush’ (1999), Josh Whedon, dir., Season 4, Episode 10, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 14 December, Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Television. Lametti, Daniel, Harris, Aisha, Geiling, Natasha and Matthews-Ramo, Natalie (2012), ‘Which pop culture property do academics study the most?’, Slate, 11 June, http://www.slate.com/blogsbrowbeat2012/06/11pop_culture_ studies_why_do_academics_study_buffy_the_vampire_slayer_more_ than_the_wire_the_matrix_alien_and_the_simpsons.html. Accessed 6 April 2015. Love, Heather (2007), Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mendlesohn, Farah (2002), ‘Surpassing the love of vampires; Or, why (and how) a queer reading of the Buffy/Willow relationship is denied’, in Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery (eds), Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 45–60. More, Thomas (1912), The Utopia of Sir Thomas More, New York: Macmillan. Muñoz, José Esteban (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, New York: New York University Press. Negt, Oskar and Kluge, Alexander (1993), Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Puar, Jasbir (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schatz, Thomas (1991), ‘The family melodrama’, in Marcia Landy (ed.), Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, pp. 148–67.

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Singer, Ben (2001), Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts, New York: Columbia University Press. Warner, Michael (1993), Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilcox, Rhonda (2005), Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, London: I.B. Tauris. Williams, Linda (1998), ‘Melodrama revised’, in Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 42–88.

SUGGESTED CITATION Keegan, C. M. (2016), ‘Emptying the future: Queer melodramatics and negative utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, 1: 1, pp. 9–22, doi: 10.1386/qsmpc.1.1.9_1

Contributor details Cael M. Keegan is an assistant professor of women, gender and sexuality studies/liberal studies at Grand Valley State University, where he teaches LGBTQ studies. His book Andy and Lana Wachowski: Imaging Transgender will be published by the University of Illinois Press. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in Genders, The Journal of Boyhood Studies, The Journal of Lesbian Studies, Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Contact: Grand Valley State University, 212 Lake Ontario Hall, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI 49401, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

Cael M. Keegan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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