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beccaelizabethAgain, posting this so I can grab it to print at college.
While constructive criticism would usually be welcome, I'm fully aware this essay is rather rubbish. Its main virtue is it has the required number of words in the right week to get handed in. I'm not even sure I'm using any of those words correctly, but they are written now and therefore greatly decrease my chances of failing utterly. I'm an idiot and didn't ever talk to the tutor or remember to start the actual essay part of the study unit until this week. So by now it's pretty much past saving, and all crit will do to me is make me hide under the duvet, which is pretty much what got me in the mess in the first place.
Yet I post it public cause I'll have to get it from the not-mine computer.
*** *** ***
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a television show that ran for 7 seasons. The central character is a teenage girl with supernatural strength and speed who therefore has the power to kill vampires. The character was created in contrast to the usual horror film patterns. Instead of the little blonde girl going into the dark alley and getting killed, she goes in there and kills her attackers. Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, intended for it to be a feminist text. There have been many academic papers written about it, including many about how feminist it actually managed to be.
In the second season episode Halloween, the usual portrayal of the main characters was inverted, through the device of magical costumes that transform the wearer into what they appear to be. Buffy wore a pink dress, suitable for an aristocratic young woman of the 18th century. She therefore started acting like a stereotypical woman of the time – weak, helpless, scared, deferring to and dependent on men. The character therefore spends much of the episode being put in jeopardy, and rescued, by men. Despite this reversal, this episode still has a strong feminist message.
The episode is interesting for its use of costume. Clothes are an important signifier, both in real life and in television. Each outfit is a syntagm carrying connotations about income, social class, geographic and historical origin, and subcultural alignment. When used in fiction costume can also convey whether or not a character belongs to a particular group within the episode, and even to some extent their mood and personality. Layered clothing may suggest a layered person, with hidden depths. Conversely skin tight clothing might then suggest that what you see is what you get. Audiences learn to read the clothing of characters, so that the same line delivered by someone in a suit or someone in scruffy sweatpants is read differently. In some cases clothes are all the hint we get about a character's background.
In the first episode of the series, there is a scene where Buffy holds two outfits in front of herself in a mirror, addressing her resulting reflection 'in character' as the person who would wear those clothes. In that case the images spoke “I'm an enormous slut.” and “Would you like a copy of the Watchtower?” So both outfits were discarded, in favour of something fashionable. The scene allows TPTB to illustrate who the new character is not meant to be, as well as who she is intended to be read as. A regular teenage girl, dressed much like the other girls around her. But it is also about how individuals consciously choose who to be, and how to be that through their clothing choices. Trying on clothes, trying on identities and roles.
In the Buffy episode Halloween we see the central characters choose costumes, and hear them talk about how these costumes are meant to reflect a kind of short term constructed identity. “Halloween is the night when not-you is you, but not you.” Buffy says to Willow. The clothes are meant to represent characters they would not normally be. But they are also “The perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild with no repercussions.” Dressing up gives them licence to act 'out of character' for a night.
By showing the central characters putting on these new costumes, and in them their new personas, the episode highlights that this is the process that happens every week, that these characters are portrayed by actors, always wearing costumes and acting in unnatural ways. But it also suggests how identity is constructed and read in everyday life.
Costumes in Halloween are linked through dialogue and plot to representations of femininity. Buffy is, through her clothing choices, trying to be feminine. This is interesting with reference to Butler's theory of gender as performance, that there is no natural way to be a male or female, just a lot of ways of acting that are read as masculine or feminine. Butler believes that certain patterns have a hegemonic, dominant, cultural hold, and have come to be perceived as 'natural'. But no particular way of being masculine or feminine is natural or intevitable. Therefore Butler's theory leads to the idea that 'political action is to be directed at destabilizing the binary gendered and sexual categories of 'man' and woman', 'gay' and 'straight'. The goal of such action is to make visible the performativity of gender, to render it evident that neither gender nor sex is a natural category- indeed that the very idea of a 'natural' category is simply an effect of discourse.' [Alsop, 2002, p106]
In Halloween, the episode starts with all the characters in their usual outfits. Buffy is wearing black and dark blue, and is in a fight. She wins, but in the process ends up somewhat dishevelled, with straw in her hair. When she arrives for a date with Angel she finds him drinking coffee and laughing with Cordelia, the rich and popular fashionable girl who rules the high school social scene. As soon as Angel notices her, he comes over, and he insists her appearance is fine. But Buffy says she has to go “put a bag over my head”. She is ashamed of failing to present an acceptably feminine image. “Dates are things normal girls have. Girls who have time to think about nail polish and facials.” She associates cosmetics and grooming with femininity, and feels unacceptably unfeminine.
Later in the episode, still wearing dark colors, Buffy shops for a costume for Halloween. She finds a dress. We see her reaction first, her attention pulled away from bonding with her friends as something catches her eye. Already the dress is skewing her usual priorities. The camera gives us a Buffy eye point of view shot, moving through the racks of clothes, gradually revealing the dress, standing alone next to a mirror. It is on a stand, a hollow frame not a shop dummy. The dress is girl shaped, but empty. Buffy doesn't give it shape by wearing it, she sees the shape it is and wants to fit in. Obvious symbol for her desire to fit in to 'normal' femininity.
The dress is pink and red. Actually, the exact color changes depending on the lighting. In the first moment it is shown, the dress is spotlit against a blue-grey wall, and looks very light and pink. In other scenes it looks more strongly red. Most fans remember it as being both pink and red, though some think of it more as one or the other. How it is seen would depend on things like the settings on individual televisions as much as it does on the lighting in a scene. It changes the meaning when it changes shade. Red stands for danger and desire and strength. The femme fatale might wear red. Pink is feminine, but a suitable color for little girls to wear. One fan commented that, if Buffy's dress was not pink, it should have been. This is a very 'girly' dress. It has bows on it, and lace edges. It is hyper feminine, an exaggerated emblem of femininity. Like the corsets that would have gone with that kind of dress, it shapes the wearer to a particular ideal.
The proprietor of the costume shop arrives on the scene, takes the dress off the stand and puts it over Buffy. He holds it in front of her, so she sees herself in the mirror as if wearing it already. When she starts to express her opinion of it, her interrupts and tells her what to think of it. “Meet the hidden princess.” Then when she tries to refuse the dress, he says he will “Make you a deal you can't refuse.” So he is actively trying to get her in to this dress.
This is the man who is going to curse the costumes. In some senses he could represent men trying to define women. He is older, British, and as we find out later a former associate of Giles, the Watcher who trains Buffy as a Slayer and therefore tries to keep her in that particular role. So there are parallels. But Buffy saw the dress first, Buffy wanted it. Buffy wanted to be that girl. So it isn't as simple as being told what to do. There's an ideology at work, the socially constructed definitions of what a girl should be, internalised and acted upon even when it is not to her advantage.
There are several reasons given within the story that Buffy would want that dress. She needs a costume because she has been volunteered to look after some small children as they go trick or treating that evening. Mr Snyder, the principal, had grabbed her (physically, by the shoulder – a grip she could certainly break, but chose not to) and told her to volunteer. So a man puts her in a stereotypically feminine role, childcare. One she has no appropriate costume for. This isn't a role she usually plays.
She wants that specific costume because it resembles one she saw in a book earlier in an episode. She tried to research what Angel was like, and instead found out what women were like in his day. Concluding this was the kind of woman he would want, she decided to be like that. She perceived the woman in the elaborate dress as being all about gowns, owning them and looking good in them, and she was envious. She also felt inferior, saying she could never be like that. Her friend had to point out the drawbacks, saying “I think I prefer being able to vote.” Voting standing for the vastly improved choices available to women now. Yet, when presented with costume choices, Buffy still goes for the “fantabulous gown”, even believing the wearer to be powerless.
When the spell activates and everyone starts acting as who they appear to be, Buffy becomes the kind of screaming and fainting cliché that matches the dress. She latches on to men to protect her, and doesn't even run away very effectively.
On the one hand this gives the men in the show an opportunity to save the day, act the conventional hero, use physical force to solve problems. Because the one that would usually bring the most force to the party is incapacitated, has become the stereotypical weak woman. That doesn't exactly look like a positive portrayal of women.
But when that cliché is used, it is usually presented as normal and appropriate. This episode undermines that right away. The viewer is aware that this behaviour is in no way normal for that woman, and the other characters, men and women, continually point out how innappropriate it is. Being that kind of girl puts her in danger. But we have seen her choose to present herself that way, choose to want to be that girl, so we are aware she had the choice to not be such a cliché. The behaviour is not normal, not appropriate, and not natural. This isn't female behaviour, inevitable in one of her sex, it is a particular kind of feminine behaviour, anachronistic and exaggerated to the point of becoming ridiculous. As the dress is a particular, anachronistic, feminine item, exaggerated and simplified to become a cheap costume, not suitable for wearing in the long term, and not practical in the short term either.
Buffy, by the end of the episode, rejects the hyperfeminine artifice represented by the pink dress. “It's good to be me,” she says, as she beats the vampire that had been threatening her. And as it turns out, that also gets her the guy. Angel tells her “I hated the girls back then. Especially the noble women. [...] They were just incredibly dull. Simpering morons, the lot of them. I always wished I could meet someone... exciting. Interesting.” And the episode ends with them kissing. So Buffy the interesting modern girl, powerful and able to vote, gets everything she wanted, even sitting there in sweat pants all mussed up. Not only is femininity artificial, the parts she has focused on aren't even necessary. Strong positive feminist message.
Even though either way it's all about getting a romantic partner. And later Angel is shown to have been not entirely truthful, since he was lured into vampirism by a woman in an even more elaborate dress than Buffy wore. And Buffy continues to patrol in high heels and halter tops, which is a lot of work put in to the modern version of what that pink dress conveys. The message remains complicated, as does reality.
But overall the message of owning your own strength, making choices and navigating the creation of complex identities in the modern world remains a positive one for women, and the show has a lot of positive, feminist aspects.
While constructive criticism would usually be welcome, I'm fully aware this essay is rather rubbish. Its main virtue is it has the required number of words in the right week to get handed in. I'm not even sure I'm using any of those words correctly, but they are written now and therefore greatly decrease my chances of failing utterly. I'm an idiot and didn't ever talk to the tutor or remember to start the actual essay part of the study unit until this week. So by now it's pretty much past saving, and all crit will do to me is make me hide under the duvet, which is pretty much what got me in the mess in the first place.
Yet I post it public cause I'll have to get it from the not-mine computer.
*** *** ***
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a television show that ran for 7 seasons. The central character is a teenage girl with supernatural strength and speed who therefore has the power to kill vampires. The character was created in contrast to the usual horror film patterns. Instead of the little blonde girl going into the dark alley and getting killed, she goes in there and kills her attackers. Joss Whedon, the creator of the show, intended for it to be a feminist text. There have been many academic papers written about it, including many about how feminist it actually managed to be.
In the second season episode Halloween, the usual portrayal of the main characters was inverted, through the device of magical costumes that transform the wearer into what they appear to be. Buffy wore a pink dress, suitable for an aristocratic young woman of the 18th century. She therefore started acting like a stereotypical woman of the time – weak, helpless, scared, deferring to and dependent on men. The character therefore spends much of the episode being put in jeopardy, and rescued, by men. Despite this reversal, this episode still has a strong feminist message.
The episode is interesting for its use of costume. Clothes are an important signifier, both in real life and in television. Each outfit is a syntagm carrying connotations about income, social class, geographic and historical origin, and subcultural alignment. When used in fiction costume can also convey whether or not a character belongs to a particular group within the episode, and even to some extent their mood and personality. Layered clothing may suggest a layered person, with hidden depths. Conversely skin tight clothing might then suggest that what you see is what you get. Audiences learn to read the clothing of characters, so that the same line delivered by someone in a suit or someone in scruffy sweatpants is read differently. In some cases clothes are all the hint we get about a character's background.
In the first episode of the series, there is a scene where Buffy holds two outfits in front of herself in a mirror, addressing her resulting reflection 'in character' as the person who would wear those clothes. In that case the images spoke “I'm an enormous slut.” and “Would you like a copy of the Watchtower?” So both outfits were discarded, in favour of something fashionable. The scene allows TPTB to illustrate who the new character is not meant to be, as well as who she is intended to be read as. A regular teenage girl, dressed much like the other girls around her. But it is also about how individuals consciously choose who to be, and how to be that through their clothing choices. Trying on clothes, trying on identities and roles.
In the Buffy episode Halloween we see the central characters choose costumes, and hear them talk about how these costumes are meant to reflect a kind of short term constructed identity. “Halloween is the night when not-you is you, but not you.” Buffy says to Willow. The clothes are meant to represent characters they would not normally be. But they are also “The perfect chance for a girl to get sexy and wild with no repercussions.” Dressing up gives them licence to act 'out of character' for a night.
By showing the central characters putting on these new costumes, and in them their new personas, the episode highlights that this is the process that happens every week, that these characters are portrayed by actors, always wearing costumes and acting in unnatural ways. But it also suggests how identity is constructed and read in everyday life.
Costumes in Halloween are linked through dialogue and plot to representations of femininity. Buffy is, through her clothing choices, trying to be feminine. This is interesting with reference to Butler's theory of gender as performance, that there is no natural way to be a male or female, just a lot of ways of acting that are read as masculine or feminine. Butler believes that certain patterns have a hegemonic, dominant, cultural hold, and have come to be perceived as 'natural'. But no particular way of being masculine or feminine is natural or intevitable. Therefore Butler's theory leads to the idea that 'political action is to be directed at destabilizing the binary gendered and sexual categories of 'man' and woman', 'gay' and 'straight'. The goal of such action is to make visible the performativity of gender, to render it evident that neither gender nor sex is a natural category- indeed that the very idea of a 'natural' category is simply an effect of discourse.' [Alsop, 2002, p106]
In Halloween, the episode starts with all the characters in their usual outfits. Buffy is wearing black and dark blue, and is in a fight. She wins, but in the process ends up somewhat dishevelled, with straw in her hair. When she arrives for a date with Angel she finds him drinking coffee and laughing with Cordelia, the rich and popular fashionable girl who rules the high school social scene. As soon as Angel notices her, he comes over, and he insists her appearance is fine. But Buffy says she has to go “put a bag over my head”. She is ashamed of failing to present an acceptably feminine image. “Dates are things normal girls have. Girls who have time to think about nail polish and facials.” She associates cosmetics and grooming with femininity, and feels unacceptably unfeminine.
Later in the episode, still wearing dark colors, Buffy shops for a costume for Halloween. She finds a dress. We see her reaction first, her attention pulled away from bonding with her friends as something catches her eye. Already the dress is skewing her usual priorities. The camera gives us a Buffy eye point of view shot, moving through the racks of clothes, gradually revealing the dress, standing alone next to a mirror. It is on a stand, a hollow frame not a shop dummy. The dress is girl shaped, but empty. Buffy doesn't give it shape by wearing it, she sees the shape it is and wants to fit in. Obvious symbol for her desire to fit in to 'normal' femininity.
The dress is pink and red. Actually, the exact color changes depending on the lighting. In the first moment it is shown, the dress is spotlit against a blue-grey wall, and looks very light and pink. In other scenes it looks more strongly red. Most fans remember it as being both pink and red, though some think of it more as one or the other. How it is seen would depend on things like the settings on individual televisions as much as it does on the lighting in a scene. It changes the meaning when it changes shade. Red stands for danger and desire and strength. The femme fatale might wear red. Pink is feminine, but a suitable color for little girls to wear. One fan commented that, if Buffy's dress was not pink, it should have been. This is a very 'girly' dress. It has bows on it, and lace edges. It is hyper feminine, an exaggerated emblem of femininity. Like the corsets that would have gone with that kind of dress, it shapes the wearer to a particular ideal.
The proprietor of the costume shop arrives on the scene, takes the dress off the stand and puts it over Buffy. He holds it in front of her, so she sees herself in the mirror as if wearing it already. When she starts to express her opinion of it, her interrupts and tells her what to think of it. “Meet the hidden princess.” Then when she tries to refuse the dress, he says he will “Make you a deal you can't refuse.” So he is actively trying to get her in to this dress.
This is the man who is going to curse the costumes. In some senses he could represent men trying to define women. He is older, British, and as we find out later a former associate of Giles, the Watcher who trains Buffy as a Slayer and therefore tries to keep her in that particular role. So there are parallels. But Buffy saw the dress first, Buffy wanted it. Buffy wanted to be that girl. So it isn't as simple as being told what to do. There's an ideology at work, the socially constructed definitions of what a girl should be, internalised and acted upon even when it is not to her advantage.
There are several reasons given within the story that Buffy would want that dress. She needs a costume because she has been volunteered to look after some small children as they go trick or treating that evening. Mr Snyder, the principal, had grabbed her (physically, by the shoulder – a grip she could certainly break, but chose not to) and told her to volunteer. So a man puts her in a stereotypically feminine role, childcare. One she has no appropriate costume for. This isn't a role she usually plays.
She wants that specific costume because it resembles one she saw in a book earlier in an episode. She tried to research what Angel was like, and instead found out what women were like in his day. Concluding this was the kind of woman he would want, she decided to be like that. She perceived the woman in the elaborate dress as being all about gowns, owning them and looking good in them, and she was envious. She also felt inferior, saying she could never be like that. Her friend had to point out the drawbacks, saying “I think I prefer being able to vote.” Voting standing for the vastly improved choices available to women now. Yet, when presented with costume choices, Buffy still goes for the “fantabulous gown”, even believing the wearer to be powerless.
When the spell activates and everyone starts acting as who they appear to be, Buffy becomes the kind of screaming and fainting cliché that matches the dress. She latches on to men to protect her, and doesn't even run away very effectively.
On the one hand this gives the men in the show an opportunity to save the day, act the conventional hero, use physical force to solve problems. Because the one that would usually bring the most force to the party is incapacitated, has become the stereotypical weak woman. That doesn't exactly look like a positive portrayal of women.
But when that cliché is used, it is usually presented as normal and appropriate. This episode undermines that right away. The viewer is aware that this behaviour is in no way normal for that woman, and the other characters, men and women, continually point out how innappropriate it is. Being that kind of girl puts her in danger. But we have seen her choose to present herself that way, choose to want to be that girl, so we are aware she had the choice to not be such a cliché. The behaviour is not normal, not appropriate, and not natural. This isn't female behaviour, inevitable in one of her sex, it is a particular kind of feminine behaviour, anachronistic and exaggerated to the point of becoming ridiculous. As the dress is a particular, anachronistic, feminine item, exaggerated and simplified to become a cheap costume, not suitable for wearing in the long term, and not practical in the short term either.
Buffy, by the end of the episode, rejects the hyperfeminine artifice represented by the pink dress. “It's good to be me,” she says, as she beats the vampire that had been threatening her. And as it turns out, that also gets her the guy. Angel tells her “I hated the girls back then. Especially the noble women. [...] They were just incredibly dull. Simpering morons, the lot of them. I always wished I could meet someone... exciting. Interesting.” And the episode ends with them kissing. So Buffy the interesting modern girl, powerful and able to vote, gets everything she wanted, even sitting there in sweat pants all mussed up. Not only is femininity artificial, the parts she has focused on aren't even necessary. Strong positive feminist message.
Even though either way it's all about getting a romantic partner. And later Angel is shown to have been not entirely truthful, since he was lured into vampirism by a woman in an even more elaborate dress than Buffy wore. And Buffy continues to patrol in high heels and halter tops, which is a lot of work put in to the modern version of what that pink dress conveys. The message remains complicated, as does reality.
But overall the message of owning your own strength, making choices and navigating the creation of complex identities in the modern world remains a positive one for women, and the show has a lot of positive, feminist aspects.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-29 04:14 pm (UTC)