"How can anyone have a vocation that incorporates some elements traditionally associated with virginity and others traditionally associated with motherhood? Here is where Buffy can be helpful, can show us a way to mix and match. Like many American women her age, she qualifies - at least literally - neither as virgin nor as mother. Yet no one could be further from the stereotypical "selfish" secular feminist implicitly criticized by the pope and others. The series is about vocation; it explores what it means for Buffy to be a vampire slayer, not merely to slay vampires for fun or profit. It shows her struggling to live up to the demands of the role, sacrificing the usual teenage pleasures to meet her unusual responsibilities. It also shows her growth in competence, wisdom, and confidence, and her eventual realization that the sacrifices are worth it. In exploring the meaning of vocation, the show suggests ways of overcoming several dichotomies that hamper a creative and humane response to the contemporary situation of women."

"Established as the 'chosen one’ in the 1992 film, and then in the television series which debuted mid-season in 1997, Buffy has slashed her way not only through the fictional constraints placed upon her predecessors in vampire carnage, but through the conventions governing gendered constructions of the warrior. Warrior tradition constructs a coherent masculinity, including impenetrable male bodies, as the key to warrior identity, and renders 'slay-gal’ not only paradoxical but, arguably, impossible. It is this (im)possibility, and the ways in which Buffy the Vampire Slayer fractures and reinvents the gendered identity of the warrior-hero, which are explored in this article."

"From its beginnings, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer has been engaged in developing both a playful and a serious consideration of gendered relations of power in contemporary North American society. And as the series has evolved, its central theme has become the danger of ignorance and of oppressive patriarchal power structures. The woman warrior leitmotif has served the aims of the program well. This recognizable symbol of female agency in the world has permitted Joss Whedon to explore in innovative ways how gender identities are imposed and resisted in contemporary culture, for boys and men as well as girls and women. The program picks up on the current fascination with tough women in popular culture, but it goes further. At one level Buffy's martial arts prowess affirms rather than subverts patriarchal mores; at a more subtle level, the non-combat strategies that the Slayer and Slayerettes often employ to defeat evil serve as a method to re-vision or reconstitute warrior hero material and even to weave a pacifist thread into plot structures. In other words, Buffy as an open-image hero and Buffy (the program) as unfolding dramatic narrative, expose stereotypes and coded symbols that shore up a rigid war-influenced gender system in an attempt to chart new meanings for womanliness and manliness. "

"In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy's relationship with her mother can be understood as a metaphor for the tenuous relationship between second and third wave feminists. Joyce was the quintessential second wave feminist - she came of age in the 1960s, participated in the civil and women's rights movements, worked fulltime and divorced Buffy's father. She knew nothing of Buffy's powers as a slayer until well into the third season, misreading her difficulties with school as laziness or a lack of focus rather than as a result of unconventional work."
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"Buffy's creator, screenwriter Joss Whedon, told Entertainment Weekly last month that the original idea was to create a feminist role model for kids. That idea was quickly subverted, Whedon said, because if she were just an ironclad hero -- ''I am woman, hear me constantly roar'' -- it would have become quickly tiresome. By finding Buffy's weaknesses, vanity and foibles, the series shaped a three-dimensional being rather than a plot-driven caricature."

"This television series is premised upon the novelty of a California valley girl who kicks ass, literally. The character of Buffy ruptures the action-- adventure genre, in that a female is controlling the narrative and delivering the punches. Moreover, Buffy's embodied strength, power, and assertiveness destablize the traditional masculinist power of the vampire character in the horror genre, in effect policing those who prey upon the feminized. The series gleefully transposes conventional relations of power between the body-that-bleeds and the bloodsuckers. (The narrative implies that slayers are initiated at menarche, though Whedon and his writers are silent on the subject of menstruation.)"

"Buffy was explicitly conceived as a feminist reimagining of the horror genre: Screenwriter/TV producer Joss Whedon has said in interviews that his very inspiration for Buffy came from years of watching horror movies in which "bubbleheaded blondes wandered into dark alleys and got murdered by some creature." Whedon wanted to make a movie where the blonde "wanders into a dark alley, takes care of herself, and deploys her powers" to kill the monster. Buffy's exploits implicate the audience in a witty defiance of genre conventions: Instead of shouting, "Don't go in there!""

"Underneath her high-gloss sheen of sophistication, beyond the slick gimmickry of the show's know-it-all comedy, Ally McBeal is perhaps the most regressive female presence on television since Edith Bunker, a walking time bomb of sham equality and invited sexism. Viewers looking for sharp commentary on gender relations, or illumination of the pitfalls of office politics, would be better off watching reruns of "That Girl"or "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." Or better yet, they should tune out Fox and tune in a show about a girl who's still in high school but happens to kill vampires for a living."

"The popularity of Buffy and her spiritual sisters-Xena, Captain Janeway on "Star Trek: Voyager" and Dana Scully on "The X-Files"-suggests that fantasy television can tell stories about women that reality-based shows won't. "What interests me is making a hero out of somebody who doesn't [ordinarily] get to be a hero," such as an adolescent girl, says Joss Whedon, the show's creator. By recasting the classic quest myth with a woman as the star, "Buffy" tells viewers that girls can fight evil, too. Hey, it beats going to law school."

"Sarah Michelle Gellar, who plays "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," also on WB, lauds the empowerment of young women these shows represent. "The wonderful thing about this trend is that young girls have something to look up to, that they can take care of themselves," she says, adding that while Buffy may not be the smartest or most popular girl in school, "she's an individual, and I think the hardest thing to learn as a teenager is individuality.""

"We can also view Buffy's goal of staking Angelus as a reversal of their initial sexual encounter and as a reversal of gender roles. Finally, we see that both characters contain the capacity for great love and great aggression toward each other. This tangle of psychological and sexual roles and moral positioning does not lead to easy analysis, but it does reflect the complexity of real human personalities and relationships."

"There would be no Dark Angel without Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Max is the Anti-Buffy, dressed up to look like Faith (Buffy’s fellow slayer, who succumbed to the Dark Side) while being neither. There is a distinct difference in the presentation of female power between these two shows: Buffy’s power is defined as exclusively female and is presented as independent of her sexuality; Dark Angel takes pains to link Max’s power and her libido."

"Buffy and the other butt-kicking babes may be flawed heroines, but even teen magazines like Seventeen show that they're changing the ways young women think. I remember countless adolescent nightmares about being stalked by serial killers; the young women surveyed in an issue about dreams said they most often dreamt that they were Buffy, slaying vampires and demons. "

"...Nevertheless, Whedon concedes that feminism and TV writing aren't an easy match. The many women who think the violence on Buffy is over the top (and who find the title character's skimpy outfits a bit of a contradiction) would agree. "I've always been sort of torn in my feminism over how much of my interest was genuine caring," he admits. "At one point I recognized I had a tendency to put women on a pedestal to a point where they weren't real characters. I've always been terrified that's what I was doing." So, are Buffy, the Alien characters, and the other strong women he's created just new versions of the classic "tough broad" who's still controlled by the guy behind the scenes? Or is Whedon really a feminist, pro-gay writer-an anomaly in Hollywood? The truth is, there are no simple answers, even on horror shows."

"The symbolism is dizzying. Drugs, alcohol and gangs are conspicuously absent from Buffy's high school, but it's clear that these are Hell Mouth's vomitus. Demons are the gangs. The surreal transformations in gullible kids victimized by demons--that's your brain on drugs. And the helplessness of grown-ups in the face of this Hell--that's life. Even Buffy's love, Angel, is in the end just another vampire. 

Done with sly yet generous humor, Buffy lets us forget the pain of its premise--which is precisely its appeal. Buffy, the pagan priestess, struggles to turn darkness into light, but the battle is unending. There's always another vampire to fight, every night, every generation. Humor makes it bearable but doesn't change it."