Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Girls Who Bite Back, edited by Emily Pohl-Weary

By john burns

Publish Date: 6-May-2004

Sumach Press, 358 pp, $26.95, softcover.

When our culture’s most visible champion of girl power is a Valley slayer named Buffy Summers, you know post­third-wave feminism is...confused. Buffy and her ilk (Xena, Lara Croft, et cetera) do deliver positive messages; they’re just hard to discern sometimes between the car ads and the ass shots. Or as Candra K. Gill writes in her persuasively argued contribution to the essay/fiction anthology Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks: "We need to approach these works on multiple levels, so we can say, yes, BtVS [Buffy the Vampire Slayer] was a great show with transgressive and recontextualized images, but it also ended up perpetuating some racial stereotypes even as it gestured toward critiquing them."

Girls bands together thinky pop-culture essays, Lollapa-memoir, take-back-the-skies fiction and artwork, and even a recipe for spring rolls to rough out the ideological landscape available to the critical fan of science fiction and speculative writing, movies, television, and comics. Given that 37 people (mostly women, many from Toronto or Vancouver) contributed, there is a plurality of voices overrunning any single conclusion. Consensus is not the goal, anyway, though commonalities echo between the entries: a hunger for role models, a dissatisfaction with mainstream imagery, a yearning to glimpse a world beyond our own, an arching of eyebrows that the "real" world should be considered any more real than the Buffyverse.

Sophie Levy’s "A Manifesto for the Bitten" is a nonfiction standout ("The clinical cathedral of the mothership and the intimate velvet of the vampire’s bite-embrace are both fetishizations of the boundary between sexual desire and reproduction"); among the short stories, look for Daniel Heath Justice’s spirited and silly "High Fashion and the Necromantic Arts", Judy MacDonald’s fully realized "Act of Grace", and Nalo Hopkinson’s weirdly gentle revenge tale, "Smile on the Face".