The Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic book has been the news recently with the announcement that they’ll be introducing a new slayer – a male slayer. For those who never watched/read Buffy, it’s been a part of the fiction up until now that slayers are always female. (It’s a female power thing, y’see.)
The new male slayer is gay, and a lot of critics are heralding this as a good step forward for the Buffy fiction. For example, Comic Book Resources writes:
The introduction of Billy as a gay male Slayer also goes a long way towards neutralizing the strict gender roles our culture carved out and then used to trap and dehumanize those who don’t fit into them.
Personally, I’m not so sure. I worry that adding a gay male slayer to a group that’s otherwise exclusively female doesn’t really move toward undermining gender norms. Instead, it seems to reinforce the stereotype that gay men are. . .kind of like women. Which is a really problematic stereotype.
I agree that it’s great to have characters that stretch our notions of the gender binary. But why not, if that’s the aim, have a slayer character who’s trans? In a fiction where being a slayer is the embodiment of female power, it looks weird to say that gay men can be slayers too. It looks like you’re saying that gay men have some element of femaleness that straight men don’t have. But it would be great to say that trans women can be slayers.
In Grant Morrison’s comic The Invisibles, one of the main characters is a trans woman. She has powers which are, according to the fiction, uniquely had by women. That looks like a good way to challenge gender norms and the gender binary, without subtly suggesting that gay men are sort of like women.
Is it relevant that Billy, the gay male character, is not actually a Slayer? That is, he does not have the super powers that Slayers like buffy have, but is in fact just an ordinary human who has trained himself to be a badass?
Here’s an inteview with writer Jane Espenson that confirms this is the case: http://io9.com/5942152/how-on-earth-is-the-buffyverse-getting-a-male-slayer
Interesting, thanks, Eugene!
The drawing bothers me. Looking at her hands, my wrist hurts at the bare idea of holding a heavy axe-head that way. All the stress is on the thumb and the flexor carpi muscles. What woman with a brain would hold a weapon that way, and what the hell is the other hand doing? (Too much coffee, sorry.)
One might grip one’s axe in that way if one was spinning it around above one’s head.
Eugene, that’s interesting – and I do think it makes a big difference. What I’d read suggested the new character really was a new Slayer.
Monkey, that’s how I was trying to fanwank it, except that her hand is way over on the other side of her head from her shoulder. AGH! It bugs.
In my fantasies, the next Slayer would be a less feminine woman, but I know comic-industry folks who’d say that wouldn’t sell.
But the scythe also has a pointy-sword-knife-thingy on the end. I’d say she’s spinning it around above her head before stabbing something on the ground.
Fanwank away.
Thanks for clearing that up. I too was initially irked, but badassery is acceptable.
I’m glad that things were not as magicalersatz originally thought, but now all I can think about is how badass it would be to have a trans* slayer.
Even if Billy is not innately or metaphysically a “Slayer,” I think part of magicalersatz’s worry will still stand. If he becomes even something like an honorary slayer, we will still have the larger cultural context that can frame gay men as something like slight deviations from straight women. It will probably depend a lot though on how they portray Billy and what he thinks of his relation to other Slayers.
Also I second Itszee’s comment.