Table of Contents

Introduction

1. “I’m Buffy and You’re . . . History”: The Postmodern Politics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

2. “Kicking Ass is Comfort Food”: Buffy as Third Wave Feminist Icon

3. “This Revolution Will Be Televised”: Buffy and the Transnational Sisterhood of Slayers

4. “Never Kill a Boy on the First Date”: Masculinity in Extremis
Angel’s Abjection
Riley, Heteronormativity, and Relapse
Sex, Suffering, and Spike

5. “From Beneath You It Devours”: Andrew and the Homoerotics of Evil

6. “Why Can’t You Just Masturbate Like the Rest of Us?” Pleasure, Pedagogy, and Fandom

7. “I Think the Subtext Here is Rapidly Becoming Text”: The Slayer’s Legacy in Popular Culture

8. “Where Do We Go from Here?”: The Future of Buffy Studies

Notes

Bibliography

Promotional Information

Fresh investigation of Buffy's feminism.

About the Author

Patricia Pender is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She is the author of Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (2012) and specialises in gender and popular culture, early modern literature and feminist theory. A member of the editorial board of Slayage, she has published numerous articles on feminist theory and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Reviews

"I have read several Buffy Studies books, and this one will count among the best. One of its most appealing features is that it constitutes a general reappraisal of the series as well as a hefty appraisal of just about everything that has been published on the subject before...this book can be summed up with the phrase 'how to do (feminist) things with Buffy.'" --Georges-Claude Guilbert, Cercles, January 2017