Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 86

82

Popular Culture Review

to Buffy’s secret slayer identity until the last episode of the second season.) Willow
voices the cynical postmodern summation of the hypocrisy of celebrating the
genocide of an indigenous culture. Nevertheless, Buffy convinces Willow, Xander,
and Anya (played by Emma Caulfield)—Xander’s demon girlfriend who grants
spurned women retribution towards men—to come to a “real Thanksgiving dinner”
at Giles’ home. When Giles asks why the dinner has to be at his house, Buffy
replies, “You’re the patriarch; you have to toast the festivities or it’s all meaningless.”
Giles notes that it’s more a matter of leaving him with the mess to which Buffy
agrees. Later as the plot develops, avenging spirits of slaughtered native Americans
begin to attack and kill. Willow is reluctant to help devise a plan to kill the spirits
due to her nationalistic guilt. Into the mix enters another recurring character called
Spike (played by James Marsters), although an enemy of Buffy’s, he has come to
her for help because he has been implanted (neutered) so that he can no longer
“perform” as a vampire. He speaks with a British accent and adds commentary to
the discussion about the avenging spirits. He scoffs at the guilt feelings expressed
by Willow and speaks with the imperialistic voice of the “natural order” and “might
makes right” in Western colonialism. Within this single episode,
has offered
ironic commentary and parody of cultural icons such as nationalistic holidays,
patriarchal customs, masculine libido, and colonial expansionism.
For poststructuralist feminists, the duality of male/female becomes the most
troublesome and its inversion and subsequent neutralization is the object of a
collective activity. Feminists seek means to subvert the patriarchal nature of Western
society. Feminists, like Luce Irigaray in “The Power of Discourse and the
Subordination of the Feminine,” re-write the psychoanalytic assumptions of
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to demonstrate that gender roles are constructed
through language. Judith Butler analyses male/female construction from the
perspective of the body. She points out that the body has been conceived as a
fixed, unitary, primarily biological reality. However, she, along with other feminist
scholars, sees the body as historically and linguistically constructed and mediated.
This construction of gender results from “performance” of the gender roles as the
effect of cultural and linguistic stimuli. We are not born with feminine or masculine
attributes, rather, we learn to perform them in compliance with the dominant culture
of heterosexual behavior. Butler argues that meaning comes from the repetitive
nature of these performances. She proposes a subversive performance that
undermines these “conventional” roles. She discusses the parody of traditional
gender roles by “drag” performances as seen in gay clubs: “...the category of women
does not become useless through deconstruction, but becomes one whose uses are
no longer reified as ‘referents,’ and which stand a chance of being opened up,
indeed, of coming to signify in ways that none of us can predict in advance” (29).
Although much of her discussion of subversive performances deals with homo/