This morning Intellect Books introduced the covers of their upcoming Fan Phenomena series. The collection on Buffy includes an essay by yours truly! Last year, I interviewed Etsy artists about the Buffy-themed items in their shops and have been most excited to see it hit the shelves! The book will be available in August.
It’s just so incredible… who would have thought that a TV show would have impacted me so much? I can’t believe we’re coming up on the 16 year anniversary of Buffy‘s premiere. I have officially been a fan of Whedon for half my life!
Buffy’s been on my mind today, so I wanted to write a quick post. It all started this morning when Whedonesque linked to lostboy_lj’s LiveJournal post: “The Monomythology of Buffy.” It was one of the first things I read today. A brief post accompanied with Buffy images to chronicle Buffy’s descent into the underworld and return with the boon. This sparked my interest more than your average Buffy article because this was the topic of my entire Master’s thesis. It was interesting to see what lostboy_lj plugged into each piece of the wheel as I had different selections. At some point when I’m not still working on my own research for grad school, I want to pour over his selections in more detail. For now, it just made me happy to see people are still talking about Campbell, still talking about Buffy, and still working the pop-culture to myth connection. It’s a strong connection that I’m really surprised doesn’t get talked about even more.
As I continued through my day, checking into social media as I do, I just kept seeing Buffy everywhere. This is of course because I follow fellow fans on Twitter and pages like SlayerLit on Facebook. In fact, SlayerLit posted 3 new articles on Buffy today from just the last few days. I simply must link to them. I’ll confess I haven’t had a chance to read them all yet, but I plan to. And if you’re here, you’d probably like to read them too:
One Man’s Myth: How Joss Whedon Showed Me the Crack in the Invisible Wall
Myths About Joss Whedon (That Keep Non-Whedonistas Away)
A Love Letter to Buffy Summers
It’s nothing new that people are still talking about Buffy – it just makes me crazy happy that they are. This show has so much depth, substance, and life in it. Not to mention, Buffy was as much of my high school experience as anyone else I met sophomore year. There’s no doubt that the nostalgia factor is just as important to me as the brilliance of the series. And the fact that I was able to take my best friend Buffy with me from high school into college and then into the world of academia in graduate school and beyond… it’s really been a great journey.
Thursday was a beautiful day in Texas and a great day at the PCA conference. I used the morning to squeeze in some site seeing, and in the afternoon I returned to the hotel for exciting academia!
The first paper that really stirred my excitement was in aLOST panel. Dr. Kevin Drzakowski presented a fun theory on season six: he argued that the flashforward was both a heavenly dimension AND an outcome of “the incident.” Chew on that for a while! It will really get your brain going!! Apparently there was also a round-table discussion at the conference on the series finale, but I didn’t hear about it until it was over! That would have been great to get in on.
I then attended a panel that examined gender in Supernatural. The Q&A afterward brought out some great dialogue. There were four women on the panel (Amanda Straw, Kathleen McClancy, Melissa Bruce, and Lugene Rosen) and the discussion eventually got around to the fact that the fandom seems to be greatly female based. As I shared at the time, I’ve never really been involved in the Supernatural fan community, and it never occurred to me that the viewership would be so gender-based. I’ve been watching it with my husband, and we’ve both enjoyed it greatly!! It wasn’t until he and I went to the PaleyFest panel in March that we learned the female fans have a larger presence the male fans. One of the panelists then claimed that PaleyFest actually has even more males than the average Supernatural convention. (I wonder though if females are just more inclined to go to the conventions, and maybe the males are just more quiet at-home viewers?) The panelists then posed the question to the men in the audience: Why do you watch Supernatural? I quickly texted my husband, and he replied: “Because Dean is awesome. The Impala is awesome and guns and violence are awesome. Oh, the story is really awesome too.” I then shared his response, and the audience got a real kick out of it.
As the Q&A went on, I was surprised by an audience question: Aren’t Sam and Dean just white trash? A panelist was able to quote Kripke as saying the Winchesters, like all hunters, are clearly blue collar works. Someone jokingly commented that the boys sure are pretty and in nice clothes for white trash. Ultimately, the panelists drove home the idea that, despite the fact that the boys live out of a car, they have consistently demonstrated strong work values!
In the evening, I had the great pleasure of presenting on a panel with Jeffrey Bussolini and Erin Waggoner.
Jeffrey entertained us greatly with his paper “…Elle s’appelle Buffy: On the Rendering of Buffy in French and Italian.“ With his mastery of language, he was able to make comparisons to the original English version with the dubbed French and Italian version. I regret I didn’t take notes during his presentation, so I don’t have any great examples to dazzle you with, but it’s very intriguing to see how words are changed and how the meaning can be altered and how the puns have to be translated to have cultural relevance!! I look forward to seeing his continued work.
Erin presented us with, “Did the Professor Really Just Say That? : Teaching the Visual Rhetoric in Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s ‘Hush’ “ and cleverly showed us how to integrate Buffy into the classroom!! Using “Hush” to demonstrate the significance of language is brilliant! Students learn to watch and listen, pick up on visual cues, and discuss rhetoric in a refreshing way.
Erin's Final Slide
In my presentation, I discussed “Death and Sacrifice: Season Five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In my essay, I argue that the way Whedon presents death and the characters responses to it (particularly in “The Body”) demonstrate to us that our culture is lacking appropriate death rituals. I also speak to how powerfully Whedon depicts the human experience and moves us, mythologically, throughout this season. The full presentation is now available here.
After my panel, I was in for a great treat: a Once More with Feeling sing-along! The audience was smaller than I expected, and there were complications with the audio and getting started… but I was in a room with singing Whedonists, so I was pretty darn happy!
Last month, I was honored to have an article included in the PopMatters Spotlight on Joss Whedon. This has been such an exciting time! At its completion, this will have been a six week Whedon extravaganza with each weekday revealing two or three new articles on all things Whedon. If you haven’t been reading, you’ve got a lot of goodies waiting for you!!
The day my article hit, I was tickled to have it earn a post on Whedonesque, which in term earned me a long-awaited Whedonesque membership!
I recently discovered my article was also linked on the International Psychoanalysis website as well as NPR’s Topic List. This is big fun for a small geek girl!!
