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    Buffy the vampire slayer: what being Jewish has to do with it

    117279_BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER4.pdf (116.0Kb)
    Access Status
    Open access
    Authors
    Stratton, Jon
    Date
    2005
    Type
    Journal Article
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Citation
    Stratton, Jon. 2005. Buffy the vampire slayer: what being Jewish has to do with it. Television and New Media. 6 (2): pp. 176-199.
    Source Title
    Television and New Media
    DOI
    10.1177/1527476403255828
    ISSN
    15274764
    Faculty
    Faculty of Media, Society and Culture
    School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts
    Faculty of Humanities
    Remarks

    The link to the journal’s home page is: http://tvn.sagepub.com/

    The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Television & New Media, Vol. 6, No. 2, November 2005, by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved. Copyright © 2005 by SAGE Publications

    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/19988
    Collection
    • Curtin Research Publications
    Abstract

    This article examines the whiteness in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The author argues that the show’s overwhelming whiteness is a product of a generalized white anxiety about the numerical loss of white dominance across the United States and, in particular, in California. The article goes on to think through the role that Jewishness plays in the program, discussing the relationship between the apparently Anglo-American Buffy, played by a Jewish actor, and her sidekick, Willow, who is characterized as Jewish but is played by a non-Jewish actor. The evil master in the first series is given Nazi characteristics and the destruction that he wants to inflict carries connotations of the Holocaust. Structurally, Buffy is produced as the Jew who saves the United States from this demonic destruction. In this traumatic renarrativising, the Holocaust comes to stand for the white-experienced crisis of the loss of white supremacy in the United States. With this reading we can begin to understand the show’s popularity among early adult, predominantly white Americans.

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