Buffy the Vampire Disciplinarian:
Institutional Excess and the
New Economy of Power
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS), the hit television series featuring a teen-age
girl with super-human powers who fights vampires and other forces of evil, has
inspired increasing critical attention over the last few years. This attention is largely
focused on three propositions: Buffy represents a liberatory feminist figure (Wilcox;
Harts); the show’s vampires and demons represent the failure of reason, science,
and technology to solve contemporary social problems (Owen); and the show offers
a moderately Marxist critique of culture (McMillan and Owen). Imphcit in each of
these propositions is the notion that, in her struggle against vampires and demons,
Buffy subverts concrete and often callous political, social, economic, and
educational institutions. Throughout the first four seasons, for example, Buffy
struggles against the institutional powers embodied in the high school, the mystical
Watcher’s Council, and the mihtary-industrial complex called The Initiative. This
apparently subversive project seems to have been extended in the spin-off series
Angel, in which the title character, a vampire cursed with a soul, helps those in
need while struggling against the sinister law firm Wolfram and Hart.
However, more recent critics, such as Kent Ono, have begun to perform resistant
readings which suggest the show is not as subversive as it appears. While Ono
focuses on the show’s representations of race, this essay argues that the show’s
representations of institutional power are also less transgressive than they seem.
Rather than simply exposing the evils of institutions, a project which might seem
in line with Foucault’s study of punitive systems in Discipline and Punish, both
BtVS ind Angel actually offer an alternative system of power and control which is,
as Foucault describes the modem penal system, “more regular, more effective,
more constant and more detailed in its effects” (80). Therefore, these apparent
subversions of institutional power merely signal a resistance to the excessive use
of power, to outdated institutional models rather than to institutional power in
general. In other words, while these programs may be read as supporting Marxist
or feminist subversions of institutional constmctions, they ultimately reaffirm the
role of institutions in maintaining social order.
From the very first episode of BtVS, “Welcome to the Hellmouth,” the series
estabhshes a pattern in which institutions are shown to be inefficient, inadequate,
and misguided in their efforts to maintain order. The premise of the episode is that
Buffy Summers has moved to a new high school in Sunnydale, California, after