'Friends are the family we choose for ourselves': Young people and families in the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer

The young people at the centre of Buffy the Vampire Slayer present themselves as an alternative family that contrasts with the programme’s conventional families. This device helps to raise awareness about changing family structures in contemporary Western society, particularly with respect to the family’s capacity to facilitate the development of young people. The series implies that the stability associated with the nuclear family is often illusory and/or achieved at the price of young people’s freedom and agency. The alternative structure, by contrast, answers the call for the ‘democratisation’ of the family (Giddens, 1999) and is coded positively in spite of many weaknesses

The Vampire Spike in Text and Fandom: Unsettling Oppositions in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

First paragraph: This special issue examines a number of key issues in cultural theory through the development of, and reaction to, a popular television character, the vampire Spike from the cult television success Buffy the Vampire Slayer. As the latest in a long line of sympathetic vampires, Spike's textual construction rearticulates the dualities which fictional vampires have long embodied: the simultaneous expression of erotic repulsion and attraction; a fear of and desire for the 'Other'; the ambivalences of a troubling ontology figured through a creature that is neither dead nor alive. As Nina Auerbach has stated: 'Vampires are neither inhuman nor nonhuman nor all-too-human; they are simply more alive than they should be' (1995: 6). Like his fictional ancestors, Spike blurs boundaries and raises ambiguities, but he does so in a manner firmly located in today's cultural landscape. Spike joins Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Season 2 with a swagger and a vulnerability which alludes to the many oppositions that he will come to unsettle. Spike is polymorphous: he is both man and monster, both masculine and feminine; and his increasingly fractured self undermines the Manichaean struggle which is central to so much of today's popular culture