1. “ARE YOU READY TO BE STRONG?”: IMAGES OF FEMALE EMPOWERMENT
IN 1990s POPULAR CULTURE, THEIR LIMITATIONS, AND BUFFY THE
VAMPIRE SLAYER
by
Sally Maria Castillo
Presented to the
Committee on Degrees in History and Literature
and the
Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality
in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts
with Honors
Harvard College
Cambridge, Massachusetts
February 28, 2014

2. Word Count: 19,713

3. TABLE OF CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH 1
INTRODUCTION: FEMALE STRENGTH 2
CHAPTER 1: COMMERCIAL STRENGTH
NEOLIBERALISM, THIRD-WAVE FEMINISM AND THE EMPOWERED FEMALE CONSUMER 11
CHAPTER 2: MAJORITY STRENGTH
NEOLIBERAL LIMITATIONS AND MEDIA CONSTRAINTS IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER 40
CHAPTER 3: INTERPRETIVE STRENGTH
THE AVAILABILITY OF MULTIPLE MEANINGS IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER 68
CONCLUSION: DEFINING STRENGTH 81
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 84
BIBLIOGRAPHY 86

4. Castillo 1
“Right now you’re asking yourself what makes this different. What makes us anything
more than a bunch of girls being picked off one by one. It’s true. None of you have the
power that Faith and I do…What if you could have that power now?...
Are you ready to be strong?”
– Buffy, “Chosen”

5. Castillo 2
INTRODUCTION
FEMALE STRENGTH
In September 1998, George Magazine published their annual list of “The 20 Most
Fascinating Women in Politics.”1
The periodical gifted the number one position to then-
Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole, placing three paragraphs summarizing the goodness
of her character next to a thumbnail photograph.2
The second woman George chose to
honor was the actor Sarah Michelle Gellar, most known for her title role in the television
series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003).3
A full-page photograph of Gellar sitting
atop a washing machine accompanied the article.4
Although George honored the name “Sarah Michelle Gellar,” the three
paragraphs accompanying the actor’s picture actually praised the fictional character of
Buffy Summers, the vampire Slayer (“played with uncommon vitality by Sarah Michelle
Gellar”).5
Written by Debbie Stoller, one of the co-editors of Bust Magazine, the blurb on
Gellar/Buffy applauded the teenage superhero for embodying “a heroine who’s as tough
as nails – sparkly blue ones at that,” and argued that the show represented an important
political shift in popular culture, due to the fact that “Twenty years ago, Bewitched and I
1
George (1995-2001), founded by John F. Kennedy Jr., was a magazine that combined politics
and popular culture, in an attempt to make political ground more appealing to the average layperson.
2
Dole’s short biography was written by her husband, Bob Dole, who spent the majority of the first
two paragraphs recollecting their courtship. Briefly touching on her political activism in the third paragraph
he ended his praise of Dole with the sentence, “And if she ever wants to enter the political arena on her
own behalf, then I’m ready, willing, and able to stand with her.” Bob Dole, “The 20 Most Fascinating
Women in Politics: Elizabeth Dole,” George (September 1998), 110.
3
Other women honored in the list were U.S. Representative Mary Bono, tennis player Venus
Williams, Producer/Actor Lisa Palac, astronaut Eileen Collins and, of course, Monica Lewinsky.
4
“The 20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics,” George, September 1998, 110-113.
5
Debbie Stoller, “The 20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics: Sarah Michelle Gellar,” George,
110.

6. Castillo 3
Dream of Jeannie suggested that if the little lady at home were allowed to unleash her
powers, all hell would break loose. Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggests that girls have the
power to save the world.”6
Stoller’s analysis of the political importance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one
example of the ways feminism and popular culture intersected during the 1990s. The end
of the 20th
century witnessed a vast proliferation of images of strong and powerful
women in television, movies, advertisements and even video games,7
an advent that
fueled an already-existing dialogue about the connections between feminism and popular
culture. The melding of a feminist ideology with a popular medium was not a new
phenomenon: World War II advertising relied on a message of feminism to encourage
women to join the workforce (“We Can Do It”); Virginia Slims had long used the slogan
“You’ve come a long way, baby,”8
to market cigarettes to the independent woman; and
Charlie’s Angels and Wonder Woman had both defended American soil on television.
Yet the wide dissemination and increasing number of images of female independence,
capability or strength in popular culture attracted an impressive amount of critical
attention from scholars and media sources.9
In fact, by the 1990s, feminist images had
become so prevalent in popular culture that Catherine Driscoll declared, “Feminism, in
6
Stoller, George, 110, 112.
7
Some examples of these popular artifact are the movie La Femme Nikita (1990), the character of
Lara Croft in the Tomb Raider video game (first appearing in1996), and the series The Powerpuff Girls
(1998-2005). For more examples see Andi Zeisler, “What Women Want: The 1990s,” in Feminism and
Pop Culture (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 89-119.
8
Virginia Slims were a type of cigarette marketed solely to women. Their ads depicted women
looking confidant, mature, and sexy as they smoked. Often, their pictures were juxtaposed with a black-
and-white image of where these women had come from, including stealing cigarettes from their husbands,
or hanging out the wash. (Zeisler, 57; see also
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/5b/1978_Virginia_Slims_ad.jpg)
9
Zeisler, 27-28, 57-58, 77-80; Sherrie A. Inness, “Introduction: ‘Boxing Gloves and Bustiers’:
New Images of Tough Women,” in Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture, ed.
Sherrie A. Inness (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3.

7. Castillo 4
the sense in which the term is used in the late 1990s, has always focused on popular
culture.”10
Further emphasizing Driscoll’s point, Kathleen Rowe Karlyn wrote in a 2009
essay that during and after the 1990s, “a productive conversation…among women of all
ages about the future of the feminist movement” needed to “take place on the terrain of
popular culture.”11
Andi Zeisler pre-iterated a similar point in her 2008 history of
feminism in popular culture, stating that feminist ideology could not be “left on the
fringes” of the nation’s consciousness, and thus needed to find a “commercial, consumer
approach to appeal to all the people it hoped to reach.”12
In other words, feminism needed
to disseminate itself through the pathways of the popular.
The problem with representations of feminist, female empowerment in popular
culture during the 1990s is that many of these images were restricted or constrained in
imagination. While advertisements increasingly depicted strong, independent women
buying consumer products, female superheroes battled with prowess on prime time
television and a British pop group called the Spice Girls shouted that the future was
female from their performance stages, such images presented a limited definition of
feminism – namely, they seemed to imply that feminism was only concerned with
10
Catherine Driscoll, “Girl Culture, Revenge and Global Capitalism: Cybergirls, Riot Grrrls,
Spice Girls,” Australian Feminist Studies 14, no. 29 (April 1999): 173, Academic Search Premier,
EBSCOhost (accessed February 26, 2014).
11
Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, “Scream, Popular Culture, and Feminism’s Third Wave: ‘I’m Not My
Mother,’” in Motherhood Misconceived: Representing the Maternal in U.S. Films, eds. Heather Addison,
Mary Kate Goodwin-Kelly and Elaine Roth (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2009), 180.
12
Zeisler, 122-123. Zeisler also notes that using popular channels to promote feminism is both
complicated and contradictory: “The central problem about getting the word out about feminism was that
an effective feminism needed to critique commercialism and consumerism; it needed to pull no punches in
calling out the beauty industry, women’s magazines, Wall Street, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue as
perpetual realms of oppression. But it also needed a commercial, consumer approach to appeal to all the
people it hoped to reach – it needed to get reviewed in newspapers that people read, TV that everyone
watched, books that Oprah talked about. To succeed, feminism needed to do the equivalent of going into
Starbucks, buying a triple venti latte, and then passing out flyers about why other customers should boycott
Starbucks” (122-123).

8. Castillo 5
showing women how to claim their inner power.13
As Stoller pointed out, it was certainly
“refreshing” to see women employing their power “so directly”; yet these images of
female empowerment constituted merely one facet of visible feminism in the 1990s.14
Before Buffy began battling vampires, an underground movement called Riot Grrrl wrote
music about the struggles of being female in a misogynistic world; Susan Faludi
published Backlash, an exposé on the ways in which mass media outlets silenced women
and discredited feminism; and scholars produced papers upon papers about the
intersections of race, class, sexuality, gender and other issues of identity. The versions of
feminism that existed during the 1990s did not solely advocate for female empowerment,
but the images of women in popular culture widely suggested that this was the case.
Images of powerful women in popular culture were also problematic in that they
subtly encouraged viewers to behave like white, middle-to-upper class consumers. Most
of the female icons who told women to embrace their inner strength were white, and most
of these powerful women had consumer products for sale that they promised would grant
anyone who bought them inner strength. By the late 1990s, advertisements that infused
feminism with consumerism were common, and stores across the country were selling
“Girl Power” products, most of them connected to the Spice Girls’ impressive
franchise.15
Personal empowerment could be purchased, this culture suggested – just as
13
“The future is female” is one of the many slogan that the pop sensation the Spice Girls claimed
as their own. See The Spice Girls, Girl Power! (London: Zone/Chameleon Books, 1997), 5.
14
Stoller, George, 112.
15
Among the products that the Spice Girls offered were backpacks, coffee mugs, three-ring
binders, rings, keyrings, posters, and dolls (not to mention their records and movie). See Girl Power! and
Jonathan Van Meter, “All Spice,” Vogue, January 1998, 134, http://search.proquest.com.ezp-
prod1.hul.harvard.edu/docview/904354940/75ADFC1C1274596PQ/2?accountid=11311 (accessed
February 27, 2014).

9. Castillo 6
long as you had the money. Such a culture privileged the already privileged, but largely
ignored the marginalized groups that arguably needed the most empowerment.
This limited portrayal of female empowerment sparked academic debate about
whether many popular artifacts of the 1990s, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, could
count as truly “feminist.” In fact, the debate around Buffy as a piece of feminist popular
culture became so heated and polarized that scholar Patricia Pender felt compelled to
write an article titled, “I’m Buffy and You’re…History,” which argued that classifying
the show as either feminist or not-feminist limited the text in meaning and scope. Rather,
she argued, Buffy was both feminist and not-feminist; it was a popular text that
documented the struggle between “central terms in the debate [regarding Buffy’s status as
a feminist text] – revolution/apocalypse, feminist/misogynist, transgression and
containment.”16
In Pender’s eyes, Buffy was not a show that people should label as either
feminist or patriarchal, but rather a popular artifact that could further illuminate the
multiple understandings of feminist incarnations in popular culture. Pender’s essay and
argument spell out the difficulty of categorizing Buffy the Vampire Slayer as either a
feminist or not-feminist text, but also raise the question: why is it so difficult to classify
the television show as one or the other? Why does Buffy defy such easy categorization?17
My thesis suggests that the confusion surrounding Buffy’s status as a feminist text
stems, in part, from the political and economic environment of the 1990s. At the end of
16
Patricia Pender, “‘I’m Buffy and You’re…History’: The Postmodern Politics of Buffy,” in
Fighting the Forces, What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and David
Lavery (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 43.
17
Merri Lisa Johnson asks a similar question in her Third Waves Feminism and Television, but her
aim is more to address the guilty pleasures that television might provide. See Merri Lisa Johnson,
“Introduction: Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Television
Studies.” In Third Wave Feminism and Television: Jane Puts it in a Box, ed. Merri Lisa Johnson (New
York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 8-10.

10. Castillo 7
the 20th
century, popular culture and the mass media both contained an abundance of
powerful female figures, but they also constrained and tamed these figures’ potential
meanings. In this thesis, I examine the mechanisms used to control popular texts and the
results of their regulation. I link images of female empowerment in popular media with
the new economic ideology of neoliberalism, contending that its existence advanced
popular images of powerful, capable and independent women. However, I also argue that
while neoliberalism promoted these images of female strength, it tailored them to model
the preferred, neoliberal citizen – that is, a white, middle-to-upper-class (female)
consumer. Furthermore, I examine how, even as neoliberal culture seemed to promote
images of female empowerment in the popular, many news sources exhibited an impulse
to tame and objectify these emotionally or physically strong women, either by ridiculing
them or casting them as vulnerable, while paradoxically still praising them as positive
role models. (George’s choice to photograph Gellar sitting on top of a washing machine –
a symbol of the domestic sphere – while lauding her role as a vampire Slayer provides
only one example of this phenomenon).
I begin my thesis with an exploration of the political climate that would
eventually allow for Buffy’s creation, dissemination and popularity. I examine the
available images of powerful women that 1990s popular culture seemed to endorsed, then
connect those images and the messages they promoted with the economic ideology of
neoliberalism. I unpack how this connection between these two forces promoted choice
shards of third-wave feminist rhetoric while erasing other important topics such as
patriarchal oppression, racial divides and class differences between American citizens. To
more fully understand the limitations of this neoliberal version of feminism, I contrast it

11. Castillo 8
with the feminist, underground Riot Grrrl movement and examine the ridicule that
several news outlets heaped upon it. I then contrast the Riot Grrrls with the Spice Girls, a
British pop sensation that presented the same sort of constrained feminist message that
neoliberalism supported. However, even when complying with a neoliberal rhetoric, the
Spice Girls still came under fire from periodicals such as Rolling Stone and Vogue for
being vapid, young and silly. I argue that the similar treatment of the Riot Grrrls and the
Spice Girls from journalistic sources such as Newsweek, Vogue, and Rolling Stone
indicates a continued impulse in the American media to tame and control images of
female power and mold them into unthreatening endorsements of consumer culture.
Ultimately, my first chapter argues that although the 1990s included a unique mix of
feminist ideas and economic policies that encouraged images of female power in popular
culture, the same forces contained and tamed these images, either silencing them or
shaping them into portraits that encouraged empowerment through consumerism.
My second chapter is a case study of the ways in which the economic and
political climate of the 1990s might shape a text explicitly designed to communicate
feminist ideology. As a text, I choose the first three seasons of Buffy the Vampire
Slayer,18
a show whose creator has stated countless times that he envisioned as an icon
that would challenge America’s deep-rooted patriarchy and promote a culture that praised
18
I choose to focus on the first three seasons of the show because they were written in and aired
during the 1990s. Thus, they are the sources most likely to be influenced by the time period on which this
thesis focuses.
It is also important to keep the show within its first three seasons, because it changes quite a bit from the
first to the seventh. There is at least one collection of essays that focuses on the last two seasons alone. No
doubt Buffy changed due to internal and external factors, but tracking these changes would be much too
broad a scope for a senior thesis.
For further reading on seasons six and seven, see Lynne Y. Edwards, Elizabeth L. Rambo and James B.
South, Buffy Goes Dark: Essays on the Final Two Seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Television
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009).

12. Castillo 9
and admired powerful women.19
While acknowledging these stated feminist intentions
behind Buffy, I also explore the ways in which its dissemination through popular channels
restricted the show’s potential to construct a cohesive portrait of feminism. I finish by
examining how its integration into other channels of the mass media, such as fan
magazines, tie-in products, and new sources, objectified the character of Buffy,
ultimately casting her, paradoxically, as a non-threatening warrior. As a whole, this
chapter argues that Buffy and external news sources’ treatment of the text demonstrate
how cultural forces can take certain images of feminist intent and control their meanings,
taking away their power even as they hail it.
Having established the ways in which its dissemination through popular culture
limited the types of feminist messages that Buffy conveyed, I explore the ways in which
the show, even as a constrained text, might make subversive, feminist readings available
to its viewers. The fact that scholars and bloggers alike hail Buffy as a feminist,
subversive and transgressive text, suggests that the series offers more than a simple,
limited version of white, middle-class, neoliberal feminism.20
For examples of possible
reading strategies, I turn to the text of Buffy itself, exploring the ways in which it presents
a model of how an active viewer might glean more open meanings from the text. I posit
19
David Lavery and Cynthia Burkhead’s collection of interviews with Joss Whedon provides
many examples of the author talking about his vision of Buffy as a feminist, progressive and even
transgressive show. See David Lavery and Cynthia Burkhead, eds., Joss Whedon: Conversations (Jackson,
MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
20
For texts calling Buffy subversive or transgressive, see Rhonda V. Wilcox, “‘Who Died and
Made Her Boss?’: Patterns of Mortality in Buffy,” in Wilcox and Lavery, 3-17; Lorna Jowett, Sex and the
Slayer: A Gender Studies Primer for the Buffy Fan (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2005);
Mary Celeste Kearney, “The Changing Face of Teen Television, or Why We All Love Buffy,” in Undead
TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, eds. Elana Levine and Lisa Parks (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007), 17-41; Elana Levine, “Buffy and the New Girl Order: Defining Feminism and Femininity,” in
Levine and Parks, 145-167; even Susan J. Douglas offers some praise. See Susan J. Douglas, “Warrior
Women in Thongs,” chapter 3 in Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is
Done (New York: Times Books, 2010), 76-100. There are, of course, only a taste.

13. Castillo 10
that certain elements of the show encourage its viewers to not only engage with the
images on screen, but question it as a text, ultimately allowing them to draw more
meanings and readings from the series than would be available if it presented a cohesive
portrait of feminism.
In all, my thesis attempts to paint a portrait of select mainstream representations
of feminism as they appeared in popular culture during the 1990s. I examine how images
of female empowerment may have reflected certain aspects of 1990s feminism and
rejected others, ultimately creating an understanding of feminism that was widely
disseminated but limited in scope. I also continue a conversation responding to popular
news sources’ reactions to feminist movements and rhetoric, arguing that even when
certain facets of American media (television or advertisements, for example) seem ready
to support certain visions of female empowerment, other facets of that same media
(namely popular journals or newspapers) find ways to undermine, control and tame them.
I hope that this work will contribute to a greater understanding of the limits of feminism
in popular culture, its possibilities, and the ways in which a popular text might open up
progressive discourses even as it submits itself to the forces of media constraint.

14. Castillo 11
CHAPTER 1
COMMERCIAL STRENGTH:
NEOLIBERALISM, THIRD-WAVE FEMINISM AND THE EMPOWERED FEMALE CONSUMER
On June 29, 1998, Time Magazine issued a periodical with a cover that asked, in
large, red letters, “Is Feminism Dead?” Four decapitated heads accompanied the morbid
question, starting with Susan B. Anthony, followed by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.
The last face, also the only image in color, was the protagonist of the 1997 television
series Ally McBeal, frowning as she hovered over Time’s provocative question.21
The magazine’s cover article (“Feminism: It’s All About Me!”) gave substance to
the cover’s claim regarding the demise of feminism, listing various ways that the feminist
cause had suffered in the past decade. Comparing feminist figures in 1990s popular
culture to those from the 1960s and ‘70s, the magazine contrasted the Spice Girls’ hit
single Wannabe, containing the lyrics, “I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really
want,”22
to Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman, Hear Me Roar,” and juxtaposed the insecure
Ally McBeal23
with the confident Mary Richards of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-
1977).24
The article argued that although these various pieces of popular culture were
21
Time June 29, 1998.
22
Although Time cites this lyric in its article, the line that was considered to have more feminist
import was “If you wannabe my lover, you’ve gotta get with my friends,” putting forth the opinion that
female friendship trumped romantic, heterosexual love.
23
Although the character of Ally McBeal was supposed to supplement a variety of strong female
leads on television with her occupation of corporate lawyer, critics condemned it for portraying its
protagonist as a caricature of a ditzy blonde unsure of what to do with her independence as a single woman.
See L.S. Kim, “‘Sex and the Single Girl’ in Postfeminism: The F Word On Television,” Television New
Media 2, no. 4 (November 2001): 319-334.
24
Ginia Bellafante, “Feminism: It’s All About Me!” Time, June 29, 1998, 57; The Mary Tyler
Moore Show was the first television show to have a female protagonist whose primary interactions were
with her family, rather than a male romantic interest. She also had a job. See Andi Zeisler, Feminism and
Pop Culture (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008), 76.

15. Castillo 12
often praised for making feminism attractive or in-style, they merely represented “the
narcissistic ramblings of a few new media-anointed spokeswomen.”25
Among these
spokeswomen was Eve Ensler, the author of The Vagina Monologues, a play that Time
labeled as just another example of “giddy theatrics” that tried and failed to further a
feminist cause.26
The article criticized the latest incarnation of the play, in which
celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg, Uma Thurman and Winona Ryder read
monologues about “female private parts,” stating that the celebrity glitz obfuscated the
performance’s original purpose of raising money to combat domestic abuse.27
Earlier that
year, however, the Village Voice had declared the same performance “the most important
and outrageous feminist event since the bra burnings at the Miss America pageant in
1968”28
and praised the show’s “ability to bring every woman to a common identity
[sic].”29
The article also described the playwright as “intense, likable, and very smart.”30
25
Bellafante, 1998, 57.
26
Ibid., 56.
27
Ibid., 1998, 56.
28
While important to my argument regarding The Vagina Monologues’ reception, this quote is
also somewhat inaccurate. Although now considered at least semi-common knowledge, the 1968 Ms.
America protest to which the Village Voice referred did not include the burning of any object (if only
because the protesters were unable to acquire a fire permit). The protest’s purpose was to draw attention to
the oppressive image of Ms. America as the perfect, beautiful, demure woman, who dictated who women
should aspire to be and look like. Part of the protest included throwing constraining and uncomfortable
markers of femininity into a “Freedom Trash Can,” including bras, but also false eyelashes, hair curlers,
and high heels.
The reason behind the nationally known bra-burning myth comes from Lindsy Van Gelder, who would
later write for the feminist Ms. Magazine, but at the time was working for the New York Post. Although
Van Gelder never reported that the Ms. America protesters burned any bras, she did title her article “Bra
Burners and Ms. America,” attempting to draw a parallel between the Ms. America protest and young men
burning their draft cards in protest of the Vietnam war. The comparison, as it turned out, flew over most
people’s heads, and the next day various reporters who had never attended the protest were writing articles
describing women throwing their undergarments into a flaming trashcan (Zeisler, 50-53).
29
Also in contrast to Time’s claim that The Vagina Monologues had little, if any value as a
feminist text was her creation of the V-Day organization, which encouraged schools to direct their own
performances and donate the proceeds to local organizations dedicated to stopping violence against women
or children. Scholars Jo Reger and Lacy Story have argued that such activism points to The Vagina
Monologues’ ability to start “grassroots, national, and global activism.” See Jo Reger and Lacey Story,

16. Castillo 13
The fact that two news sources could disagree so definitively on the political
import of the same theatrical fundraiser indicated the complexity of feminism as it
appeared in 1990s popular culture. It was perfectly viable for The Village Voice to argue
for the Vagina Monologues’ feminist impulse, and equally plausible for Time to declare it
merely a “paparazzi-jammed gala.”31
Similarly, while Time disparaged the Spice Girls
and their vague lyrics about wanting something called “zig-a-zig-ah,”32
scholars
including Bettina Fritzsche and Susan J. Douglas noted that the group made feminism
seem “hip,” and allowed, to some extent, its renewed presence in mainstream American
consciousness.33
For every argument Time gave in regards to the death of feminism, there
was another argument from another source that pointed to its value as a feminist text. The
types of media that Time criticized – music, books, television shows, art – could both
represent pillars of support for a feminist cause and a poison slowly obliterating ideas of
gender equality. Popular culture was not, as Time argued, killing feminism, but it was
certainly making it more ambiguous.
The other notable characteristic of Time’s June 29 cover and article was that the
magazine seemed to be trying to express support for a feminist cause. While news
“Talking About My Vagina: Two College Campuses and The Vagina Monologues,” in Different
Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement, ed. Jo Reger (New York: Routledge,
2005), 140.
30
Blanche McCrary Boyd, “Home of the Moan: ‘The Vagina Monologues’ Seizes the Means of
Production,” The Village Voice, February 17, 1998, http://www.villagevoice.com/1998-02-
17/theater/home-of-the-moan/ (accessed February 26, 2014).
31
Bellafante, 1998, 56.
32
The “Wannabe” lyrics included the phrase, “I really really really wanna zig-a-zih-ah.” The
Spice Girls, “Wannabe”.
33
One journalist went as far as to note that “it’s probably a fair assumption to say that ‘zizazig-ha’
is not Spice shorthand for ‘subvert the dominant paradigm.” Quoted in Zeisler, 108; Bettina Fritzsche,
“Spicy Strategies: Pop Feminist and Other Empowerments in Girl Culture,” in All About the Girl: Culture,
Power and Identity , ed. Anita Harris (New York: Routledge, 2004), 156; Douglas, 19. It should be noted
that Douglas does not promote the Spice Girls as a preferred model of feminism, but she does recognize
their significance in making feminism seem attractive, especially to the younger generation.

17. Castillo 14
sources in the 1960s and ‘70s often labeled feminist activism a “contagion” and described
its supporters as “militants,”34
by 1998, Time seemed to be making an effort to atone for
other news’ outlets negative reports of the past. In fact, the magazine expressed a type of
nostalgia for second-wave activism, declaring that its various examples of purported
feminism in contemporary popular culture represented “a comedown for the
movement.”35
The article praised the feminists of the ‘60s and ‘70s for using “their daily
experience as the basis for a critique…of larger institutions and social arrangements.”36
Time’s nostalgia for second-wave feminist activity starkly contrasts the impulse from
various news sources to label feminism as not only unnecessary, but harmful to female
happiness during the 1980s, as chronicled in Susan Faludi’s Backlash.37
Now, Time
suggested, the media was on the side of feminism; they knew what constituted true
representations of female empowerment, and what they witnessed in popular culture
certainly did not count. Women, Time declared, deserved better role models than Ally
McBeal, better fundraisers than a celebrity-studded performance of a play about genitalia,
better messages from women in popular culture in general. News sources may have
disparaged feminist activism before, but the 1990s, Time assured, would yield firm
support for feminism, even if it meant pointing out the movement’s failings. However, as
the magazine critiqued feminism in popular culture as flimsy and ill-advised, it failed to
offer suggestions as to how outlets of popular culture might reform their message. It did
not ask or suggest how Ally McBeal or Ensler’s fundraiser might, in the magazine’s
34
Quoted in Zeisler, 60.
35
Bellafante, 56.
36
Ibid.
37
Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, 15th
Anniversary
Edition (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1991), 1-4.

18. Castillo 15
opinion, better advance a feminist cause. Time pointed out what it saw as the death of
feminism, but ultimately did not offer any suggestions as to how the American public
might revive it.
Time’s apparent lack of interest in proposing improvements for feminism in
popular culture (while demonstrating zeal when it came to critiquing it) suggests that,
even as it seemed to support feminism, the magazine felt an impulse to undermine and
control it.38
Such an impulse echoes the trend of 1980s magazines, journals, and
newspapers that reported on the different ways that second-wave feminism had harmed
women, their children, and the nation. For example, in 1984, Newsweek published an
article claiming that working women who left their children in daycare were exposing
them to the threat of sexual abuse. In 1986 and 1988, respectively, The Los Angeles
Times and New York Women both erroneously reported rising rates of depression among
women as a result of second-wave feminism. The New England Journal of Medicine
published a study in 1982 that not only noted an increase in infertility rates in women
over 30, but included a three-page editorial encouraging women to “reevaluate their
goals” when it came to deciding whether to pursue a career or have children – the study’s
conclusion made the front page of the New York Times.39
According to Faludi, media
attacks on feminism have been prevalent since the 1920s, continually broadcasting
reports of decreased marriage rates among college-educated women, promoting studies
linking birth control to severe health risks and suggesting that too much independence
38
Susan Faludi has suggested that the mass media and mass marketing are the “two institutions
that have…proved more effective devices for constraining women’s aspirations than coercive laws and
punishments.” See Faludi, 63.
39
Ibid., 56, 50, 43.

19. Castillo 16
generally makes women miserable.40
Such repetition suggests a deep-rooted impulse in
American culture to undermine instances of female empowerment, both fictional and
real. Thus, even as Time gave feminism (at least, second-wave feminism) its (retroactive)
nod of approval, its praise came paired with criticism and doubt.
This chapter, like Time’s article, is an examination of certain images of feminism
in 1990s popular culture. Unlike Time, I do not use these images to declare feminism
dead, but rather to better understand the type of feminism that these images endorsed. I
begin with a brief overview of third-wave feminism and its concerns relating to gender,
racial and class inequalities, as well as its goals of female empowerment. I explore how
certain pieces of third-wave feminism became integrated into popular culture, and how
others fell by the wayside. I argue that popular culture seemed to selectively support
images of female empowerment when they were connected with – or at least closely
connected to – consumer culture. I also note how magazines and newspapers often
shaped and controlled feminist images, both inside and outside of popular culture,
labeling them as ridiculous or carefully molding them into harmless commodity products.
To demonstrate the media’s continued wariness of feminist politics, I turn to the
Riot Grrrl movement, an unapologetically feminist, underground activist network that
came into existence during the early 1990s. Fueled by a stated desire to challenge and
overthrow patriarchal power structures, the Riot Grrrls eschewed the mass media and
sources of popular culture to create their own unique message without regard for profit;
the movement received very little positive press.41
I then contrast the media’s reaction to
40
Ibid., 63-65.
41
Sara Marcus, Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution (New York:
HarperCollins, 2010), 74-103.

20. Castillo 17
the Riot Grrrls with their portrayal of the British pop group the Spice Girls. Unlike the
Riot Grrrl movement, the Spice Girls happily embraced popular culture, consummerism,
and mass media. But while they complied with all the rules the Riot Grrrls rejected, the
group still came under fire from news sources for being too ditzy, too girly, too young or
too silly. Instead, the Spice Girls became useful in their ability to promote consumer
products and were eventually commodified as agency-less celebrity figures. I use these
two very different messages of female empowerment in music and the media’s distinct
yet notably similar portrayals of the women involved in them to argue that even as
popular culture seemed to promote feminist imagery, it also undermined it. Ultimately, I
argue that although the political climate of the 1990s seemed to encourage feminism’s
proliferation in popular culture, it only endorsed a neoliberal vision of the empowered
female consumer, which was then still subject to regulation and ridicule.
Many of the portraits of female empowerment in1990s popular culture reflected
select images or ideas from what would become labeled “third-wave feminism.”42
While
feminism does not, as the term suggests, occur in waves, rising up to crest and crash and
rise again, certain time periods see greater and more concentrated proliferations of
feminist consciousness or activism in American culture; the 1990s happened to be one of
them. Different scholars cite different catalysts for the growing visibility of feminism in
the 1990s, but most will point to an increased wariness among female activists with
regards to postfeminist thought – the belief that feminism had achieved its goals of
42
Although it is a bit restricting and misleading, I choose to use the prominent feminist wave
terminology because it is a commonly accepted, and thus easily recognizable and understandable, phrase
for feminist activity occurring within the last decade of the twentieth century. For more information on
alternatives to the wave metaphor, see Nancy A. Hewitt, “Feminist Frequencies: Regenerating the Wave
Metaphor,” Feminist Studies 38, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 658-680.

21. Castillo 18
equality and was thus no longer necessary.43
Scholar Amber E. Kinser defines third-wave
feminism as “the era of feminism rooted in and shaped by the mid ‘80s-new millennium
political climate.”44
The time period to which Kinser refers is one in which, due to the
activism associated with second-wave feminism (widely acknowledged as the feminist
movement occurring in the 1960s and 1970s), women were expected to have an
unprecedented level of autonomy when it came to finding and holding a job, deciding
when to have a family, or comfortably living on their own. However, despite these
expectations, women still remained unequal to men in job positions, wages, and societal
worth.45
Issues of race, racial divisions and white privilege also made their way to the
forefront of third-wave feminist discourse. The 1980s saw a proliferation of texts
acknowledging the unique experiences of women and feminists of color, such as This
Bridge Called My Back (1981) or Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987).46
In 1989, Kimberle Crenshaw published her essay “Mapping the Margins:
Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” noting how
feminist movements often saw differences within populations as a weakness and thus
tried to smooth them over, rather than acknowledging them and starting discourses
examining differences of race or sexuality. This, she posited, silenced already
43
Amber E. Kinser, “Negotiating Spaces For/Through Third-Wave Feminism,” NWSA Journal 16,
no. 3 (Fall 2004), 131. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed February 26, 2014); See also
Douglas, 10.
44
Ibid., 132.
45
Faludi, 8-12;Douglas also extends this argument to the 1990s (5).
46
Of course, there are many other highly influential feminist texts on race than listed in this
paragraph, including various writings from bell hooks, Patricia J. Williams, Cherrie Moraga…the list goes
on. For further reading on third-wave thoughts on race I list two suggestions here (note that more are
available). The collections Third Wave Feminism and Different Wavelengths, which both provide several
excellent essays on the subject. Full citations: Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford, eds.,
Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Jo Reger, ed.
Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement (New York: Routledge, 2005).

22. Castillo 19
marginalized minorities within feminist movements.47
Texts such as these changed
conceptions regarding the intersections of race and feminism, and when the third wave
began to coalesce, questions of race, racism, and white privilege often (but not always)
became points of interest for the people involved.48
Third-wave feminism also made an effort to highlight the continued oppression of
women through sexual violence, a reality that various feminist-identified groups
challenged by issuing rhetoric related to female power. The beginning of the decade
brought with it several high-profile sexual assault cases that made it clear that women
were not, as postfeminist thought iterated, equal to men in legal status, credibility, or
social power. This awareness began in October 1991, when Anita Hill charged Supreme
Court Justice Nominee Clarence Thomas with sexual harassment in the workplace.
Although she was a respected professor of law at the University of Oklahoma, the all-
male (and all-white) 49
Judiciary Committee in charge of Clarence’s appointment
dismissed her claims without much consideration.50
At the end of the year, William
Kennedy Smith was acquitted of a rape charge in Florida, despite three other women
47
Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence
Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 1241 (July 1991): 1242-1299.
48
Kristen Schilt, “‘The Punk White Privilege Scene,’: Riot Grrrl, White Privilege, and Zines,” in
Different Wavelengths: Studies of the Contemporary Women’s Movement, ed. Jo Reger (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 41-43.
49
Sara M. Evans’ description of the Anita Hill case, although a bit dramatic, both captures its
intensity and the ways in which it demonstrates the intersection of race and gender in feminism: “For 3
[sic] days, the nation stopped to watch hearings in which a committee of eight white men grilled a genteel
African-American woman lawyer. Anita Hill’s quiet dignity contrasted sharply with her interrogators’
palpable discomfort and ineptitude. They made light of this ‘sexual harassment crap’ and dwelled on
salacious details.” See Sara M. Evans, “Resurgence,” in Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at
Century’s End (New York: Free Press, 2003), 225-226.
50
Douglas, 25-26; Evans, 225-226.

23. Castillo 20
offering to testify against him (their accounts were omitted from the trial).51
In February
1992, boxer Mike Tyson52
was convicted of raping Desiree Washington, a Black Miss
America contestant.53
In September of the same year, a group of naval aviators trapped
90 people, the majority of them women, in the third floor of the Hilton hotel in Las Vegas
and sexually assaulted them.54
The barrage of high-profile sexual assault cases, along
with the all-too-common dismissal of the female victims’ accusations, fundamentally
shaped third-wave feminist thought and pointed not only to the continued necessity of
feminist activism, but also to the persistence of female vulnerability in the United
States.55
As a reaction to this emphasis on female vulnerability, many manifestations of
third-wave feminism focused on expressions of female power, a political move that
would eventually become reflected in popular culture. Women involved in the Riot Grrrl
51
For more information see Ellen Uzelac, “William Kennedy Smith is Charged with Rape,
Expected to Surrender,” The Baltimore Sun, May 10, 1991, http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1991-05-
10/news/1991130048_1_bludworth-william-kennedy-smith-palm-beach (accessed February 26, 2014);
“Kennedy Cousin Rape Trial Begins,” This Day in History, History.com, http://www.history.com/this-day-
in-history/kennedy-cousin-rape-trial-begins (accessed February 26, 2014); Mary Jordan, “Jury Finds Smith
Not Guilty of Rape,” Washington Post, December 12, 1991, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/longterm/jfkjr/stories/wks121191.htm (accessed February 26, 2014).
52
It is likely that Tyson was found guilty, at least partially, due to his race. Kennedy, a white man
related to an affluent American family, walked free; Tyson, a black man without political connections spent
three years in prison.
53
For more information see Alison Mscatine, “Tyson Found Guilty of Rape, Two Other Charges,”
The Washington Post, February 11, 1992, http://tech.mit.edu/V112/N4/tyson.04w.html (accessed February
26, 2014); Joe Treen, “Judgment Day,” People, February 24, 1992,
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20112090,00.html (accessed February 26, 2014); E.R.
Shipp, “Tyson Gets 6-Year Prison Term for Rape Conviction in Indiana,” The New York Times, March 27,
1992, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/27/sports/tyson-gets-6-year-prison-term-for-rape-conviction-in-
indiana.html (accessed February 26, 2014).
54
Douglas, 25-26; Michael Winerip, “Revisiting the Military’s Tailhook Scandal,” New York
Times, May 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/booming/revisiting-the-militarys-tailhook-
scandal-video.html?_r=0 (accessed February 26, 2014).
55
Sexual assault was also confronted by second wave feminism as a serious problem. However,
during the third wave, it received much more media attention and became a central theme in popular
culture, which did not happen as visibly in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

24. Castillo 21
movement, for example, expressed their anger at their subordinate positions as women
from the stage, screaming out their refusal to succumb to societal scripts of quiet and
demure femininity.56
They often scrawled phrases such as “slut” or “rape” across their
stomachs to draw attention to how men and the media objectified and disrespected female
bodies.57
There was talk of “reclaiming” derogatory words such as “bitch” and women
taking control of industries in the business of female objectification, such as
pornography. For example, Bust Magazine (1993 – present), chose to publish pictures
from soft-core pornography in order to assert editorial control over how and when female
bodies were exposed.58
The Vagina Monologues hailed vaginas as beautiful and powerful
organs, blending monologues that captured the pain and trauma of sexual assault with
monologues that hailed consensual sex as freeing and empowering.59
Women did not
need to be victims, the third wave asserted: they were powerful and capable, and no one
could tell them what to do or how to behave.
Another aspect of third-wave feminism that eventually found its way into popular
culture was the idea that feminism and femininity did not necessarily oppose each other.
While one of the most high-profile protests of the second wave included women throwing
markers of femininity into a freedom trash can, declaring them tools of the patriarchy,60
56
Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 133.
57
Marcus, 75.
58
Baumgardner and Richards, 133.
59
See, for example, Eve Ensler, “My Vagina Was My Village,” The Vagina Monologues (New
York: Villard Books, 1998), 57-67; or Ensler, “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy,” 89-95.
60
Referring to the Ms. America protest discussed in a previous footnote.

25. Castillo 22
many third-wave feminist groups and texts embraced these very items.61
Pioneered by
women in their twenties and thirties calling themselves Girlies, “girlie style” included
wearing high heels (and taking joy in the act), marking oneself as a girl with make-up or
showing one’s bra straps. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards explained the politics
of the style in their essay “Feminism and Femininity,” arguing that emphasizing one’s
femaleness represented a “prizing, acknowledging, or valuing of the ‘feminine,’” thus
honoring one’s female heritage and placing value on being a woman.62
Giving femininity
value, according to this manifestation of third-wave feminism, allowed girls to value
themselves as female-identified, finding power within themselves because of their
gender, rather than in spite of it.
When feminist images started appearing in popular culture, they overwhelmingly
mirrored the third-wave idea of the powerful, feminine woman. While stories of sexual
assault and rape portrayed women as weak, vulnerable victims, women in popular culture
were increasingly portrayed as strong, invulnerable and assertive. The 1990s saw an
explosion of female superheroes on television, including Xena: Warrior Princess, which
depicted its protagonist beating a variety of male villains to a pulp every week as well as
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a protagonist singularly imbued with the ability to kill
monsters. Both shows metaphorically (and sometimes explicitly) dealt with the subject of
women as targets of sexually violent men or monsters, and both portrayed their heroes as
61
See, for example, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, “Feminism and Femininity: Or
How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Thong,” in Harris, 59-68.
62
Ibid., 61.

26. Castillo 23
not only escaping, but besting their attackers.63
The Spice Girls demanded respect from
prospective suitors. Advertisements also employed a rhetoric that referenced the strong,
independent female, such as Coca Cola’s 1999 poster telling a blueprint-carrying woman,
“when you make your own choices, go for what’s real,”64
or a 1997 ad for Mountain Dew
that showed image after image of women engaged in strenuous, physical activity.65
Importantly, all of these strong women were also portrayed as undeniably feminine. Xena
fought off gangs of men in a short leather skirt, Buffy owned a variety of girlie and
stylish outfits, the Spice Girls loved dressing up and Mountain Dew’s actors kissed the
video camera’s screen at the end of their advertisement.66
According to these images,
women had an inner sexiness and power that they were expected to flaunt.
This image of the strong, independent woman not only reflected third-wave
feminist thought, but also coincided with the new economic ideology of neoliberalism
that, by the 1990s, had become a widely accepted doctrine in the Western world.67
Built
around the idea that the best economic system was one that included a completely free
market, unfettered by government-imposed regulations, neoliberalism put more value on
63
Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy, “Introduction: Athena’s Daughters,” in Athena’s
Daughters, Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy, eds. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003),
ix-xi; Inness, 2.
64
Of course, even as such a slogan communicates female independence and agency, the
advertisement ultimately instructed its audience on what to buy with the phrase, “go for what’s real,”
adding a paternalistic tone to the declaration of free choice. This is yet another example that demonstrates
the tension between feminist imagery in the mass media and its impulse to undermine it even as it promotes
and creates it.
65
Zeisler, 102-104.
66
“Mountain Dew: Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” Youtube.com,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRN_kOcQrUc (accessed February 26, 2014).
67
Manfred B. Steger and Ravi K. Roy, Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2010), x.

27. Castillo 24
the consuming citizen than the previous model of Keynesian economics,68
which argued
that government regulation was imperative in encouraging consumer spending.69
The
United States operated under largely Keynesian ideology until the 1970s economic crisis
gave economists reason to argue for revival of the unfettered market, which most
countries had stopped using around the 1940s.70
Consequently, the 1980s and 1990s
witnessed the deregulation of global economies. In the United States, this manifested in
decreased taxes for the rich, the destruction of multiple welfare programs, an increased
emphasis on competition between businesses selling comparable goods, and a valuation
of individual consumer autonomy and empowerment.71
Nancy Fraser offers a pointed critique of neoliberalism in Fortunes of Feminism,
listing the many ways in which the ideologies do not mesh. She points out that feminism,
throughout its history, has advocated for the support of marginalized and disenfranchised
citizens through public security systems, but neoliberalism promotes the deregulation of
public and private services alike.72
True to her observations, economic policies in the
1980s and 1990s redistributed the responsibility of maintaining social security programs
68
John Maynard Keynes, the economist behind the Keynesian system, encouraged government
funding of jobs and the welfare state (both of which were funded by higher taxes on the rich); after all, he
argued, an employed and supported public was more likely to buy consumer goods. Steger and Roy, 6-7.
69
The basic idea behind an unregulated global market is that the market will regulate itself, with
every country producing the goods it can make most efficiently, and buying other goods from other
sources. Thus, countries can benefit from goods that it was an advantage for them to produce. Steger and
Roy, 3.
70
Before Keynesian economics came into vogue around 1940, Liberalism (which also promoted
the idea of a free market) was the most popular economic model in the Western world. Steger and Roy, 3.
71
Steger and Roy, 11-14; BCRW Videos, “What is Neoliberalism?” Vimeo.com,
http://vimeo.com/71978595 (accessed February 28, 2014).
72
Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis
(New York: Verso, 2013), 3-4.

28. Castillo 25
to individual states, a decision that weakened America’s welfare programs overall.73
A
weak welfare state, as Fraser points out, favors privileged citizens over the marginalized:
in this case, the white, middle-to-upper-class, heterosexual, cisgender male. Furthermore,
neoliberalism utilizes a meritocratic rhetoric that supports the belief that any diligent,
dedicated and hardworking citizen can economically prosper, if only she or he tries hard
enough. However, such a belief ignores basic hegemonic structures in the United States
that favor majority citizens, thus resulting in the further marginalization of minority
groups. Such a real-world application of neoliberalism does not support, but actively
undermines many of feminism’s ideals.
This fundamental tension between neoliberalism and feminism, however, did not
get in the way of the creation of powerful female figures in popular culture during the
1990s. In fact, neoliberal ideology fueled this image and its dissemination. A neoliberal
market runs best when populated with autonomous, independent and commodity-savvy
consumers; thus, American citizens needed to see themselves as individual and
empowered consumers.74
Women, the gender most associated with malls, department
stores and shopping, became the obvious targets for messages that linked power with
consumption.75
Advertisements started guaranteeing empowerment through acquisition of
their products, such as a Lady Foot Locker commercial that flashed image after image of
73
Steger and Roy, 31, 34, 65.
74
Marnina Gonick, “Between ‘Girl Power’ and ‘Reviving Ophelia’: Constituting the Neoliberal
Girl Subject,” NWSA Journal 8, no. 2 (Summer 2006), 4-5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4317205 (accessed
February 28, 2014).
75
Woman make up the majority target audience for most advertisements. Historically, female
homemakers were expected to buy (or ask their husbands to buy) household decorations, appliances and
cleaning products. When department stores became popular in the 1950s, it was women, not men, who
flocked to these spaces. Marnina Gonick, “Between ‘Girl Power’ and ‘Reviving Ophelia’: Constituting the
Neoliberal Girl Subject,” NWSA Journal 8, no. 2 (Summer 2006), 4-5, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4317205
(accessed February 28, 2014).

29. Castillo 26
women engaged in strenuous exercise, accompanied by a cover of Helen Reddy’s “I Am
Woman,”76
or a Barbie hockey player with the tagline, “Become your own hero.”77
Such
advertisements implied that certain running shoes could make a woman invincible, or that
playing with hockey-Barbie would encourage girls to become like any hero they had ever
admired. Moreover, these images of empowering consumption created a positive
feedback loop wherein women, empowered through their participation in a consumer
environment, were expected to exercise this power by consuming more. Thus, the
advertising of the 1990s became both an endorsement of female power and a commercial
strategy that targeted women.
Even outside the world of advertising, empowerment became connected to
consumption. In 1996, cultural theorist Angela McRobbie published a study of British
women’s magazines, which argued that certain periodicals had started focusing on
“shagging, snogging and having a good time.”78
McRobbie argued that these
supplications indicated a move toward a “new femininity,” where girls and women were
expected to be assertive and free, unafraid to go out on a Friday night and take a boy
home with them to boot. However, most of the activities the magazines suggested, such
as going out and getting drunk with friends, required consumer power. While the
magazines may have pushed their readers toward a freer femininity, they linked this
76
Considering that this is the song that Time chose to praise in its article on the death of feminism,
perhaps they would have been more inclined to endorse this form of commercial feminism.
77
Zeisler, 102-103.
78
Angela McRobbie, “More! New sexualities in girls’ and women’s magazines,” in Back to
Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies, ed. Angela McRobbie (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997), 196.

30. Castillo 27
freedom, much like select American advertisements, with consumer behaviors.79
Similarly, television shows such as Xena and Buffy encouraged consumptive behaviors
through tie-in products, and the depictions of their heroes as traditionally feminine and
attractive subtly encouraged the shows’ fans to buy products with which to emphasize
their femininity.80
Buffy also portrayed its protagonist as an active consumer who had
extensive knowledge of fashion trends and the ins and outs of popular culture. Xena,
Buffy, and the women in McRobbie’s magazines mirrored both the third-wave feminist
portrait of the empowered, capable woman and the neoliberal ideal of the empowered,
individual consumer.
Although it is tempting to claim that neoliberalism, with its encouragement of
female empowerment, promoted feminism in popular culture during the 1990s, in
actuality, the economic ideology created a specific and limiting vision of feminism that
did not begin to encompass the diverse viewpoints, discourses and struggles associated
with third-wave feminism. The images of feminism promoted in advertisements and
magazines and the commodities associated with them overwhelmingly depicted moments
of individual, white and middle-class female empowerment, often connected with an
aspect of consumerism. While many branches of third-wave feminism created and
promoted images of powerful and confident women, many of them also explicitly
addressed issues of sexual assault (a topic unlikely to boost sales), racial discrimination
79
Although McRobbie specifically studied British magazines, by 1996, the United Kingdom was
also operating under a neoliberal economic system which resulted in the country’s own encouragement of
empowerment through consumption. Steger and Roy, 21.
80
Rachel Fudge, “The Buffy Effect: Or, a Tale of Cleavage and Marketing,” Bitch, 1999,
http://bitchmagazine.org/article/buffy-effect (accessed February 26, 2014).

31. Castillo 28
and oppression, the roots of sexism, male privilege, sexuality, and other difficult topics.81
The neoliberal marketplace gave a voice to the parts of third-wave feminism that declared
women powerful or capable, but silenced discourses relating to fundamental issues of
inequality within the United States.82
This neoliberal culture did not promote feminist movements that explicitly or
angrily addressed complex issues of oppression with the same zeal that it promoted
images of powerful, female consumers. Take, for example, the Riot Grrrl movement, a
punk activist network that sprung up in Olympia, Washington, and Washington, D.C. in
1991 and soon went national.83
Although predominantly white, the Riot Grrrl movement
did not fit comfortably fit within neoliberalism’s version of feminism. For example, they
acknowledged patriarchal systems of oppression, and discussed their own race bias as
majority white, middle-class individuals.84
The movement also included some women of
color, who often discussed their experienced marginalization as punk rockers in a mostly-
white underground scene and in the wider world.85
The Riot Grrrls used music and
discussion groups to talk openly about sexual harassment, rape, abortion laws and
domestic abuse, among other topics. Many women involved in the movement circulated
81
See footnotes 45-47.
82
I use “silenced” here not as an active verb, but as a passive one. Ideas are silenced both when
they are actively repressed or simply not talked about.
83
The movement was not just restricted to the United States – Riot Grrrl also spread to at least
Britain, if not to other European countries as well.
84
Schilt in Reger, 47-52.
85
For example, one African-American girl involved in the movement wrote a small piece in her
zine, Gunk, about the difficulties associated with dressing “punk” for people of color: “White kids in
general regardless if they are punk or not can get away with having green mohawks and pierced lips ‘cause
no matter how much they deviated from the norms of society their whitness always shows through. For
instance, I’ll go somewhere with my friends who look equally wierd [sic] as me, but say we get hassled by
the cops for skating or something. That cop is going to remember my face alot [sic] clearer than say one of
my white girl friends.” Schilt, 49.

32. Castillo 29
“zines” – independently produced pieces of literature, usually in the form of a pamphlet
or booklet – containing original poems or stories, instructions on how to deflate a police
car’s tire, or defaced dieting advertisements.86
In essence, the movement worked to build
a community of women that could offer support to other women living in a world they
saw as patriarchal, misogynistic and violent.
The Riot Grrrls created a threatening, aggressive image for themselves,
highlighting their own rage as a source of empowerment. Zines published headlines such
as “GIRLS! LET’S CAST SOME DIRTY SPELLS AND REMIND THE SQUARE WORLD OF JUST HOW
DANGEROUS WE CAN REALLY BE,”87
or “Let’s Smash Patriarchy Together!”88
The band
Bikini Kill, credited as a major catalyst in the Riot Grrrl movement, wrote a song titled
simply “Anthem,” which stated, “hardcore generation/teenage boy generation…/not my
generation…/it doesn’t speak to me/no not at all/I don’t see anything/there’s something
wrong/I can’t understand/your favorite song/you will never hear surf music again.”89
These writings rejected male-dominated spaces and hegemonic power structures,
damning boys who would not recognize girls as powerful or valuable, while
simultaneously calling for girls to band together and start their own modes of culture. The
Riot Grrrl Anthem clearly stated that the mainstream “hardcore…teenage boy” music that
female punk rockers heard day in and day out did not reflect their experiences (“it doesn’t
speak to me at all”), effectively declaring an end to this alienation with the last line: “you
86
Marcus, 80-89.
87
“Her Jazz,” from Huggy Nation no. 4, cited in Red Chidgey, “Riot Grrrl Writing” in Riot Grrrl:
Revolution Girl Style Now!, ed. Nadine Monem (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 106.
88
Flier for Riot Grrrl Press, printed in Chidgey in Monem, 135.
89
Bikini Kill, “Bikini Kill Excerpt #1,” in The Riot Grrrl Collection, ed. Lisa Darms (New York:
The Feminist Press, 2013), 40.

33. Castillo 30
will never hear surf music again.”90
Riot Grrrl writings sought to separate their movement
from dominant patriarchal structures, telling girls that they had the ability to create a
unique space where they could express themselves. Girls, Riot Grrrl insisted, could
threaten patriarchy.
Riot Grrrl represented a type of feminism that clashed with neoliberalism’s
rhetoric of empowerment through consumption. In fact, the network refused to believe
that empowerment could come from consumer goods. Instead, Riot Grrrl encouraged its
members to actively produce culture and art. Since its birth in the 1970s, the punk rock
scene had perpetuated a “Do-It-Yourself” attitude, encouraging members of the
community to not only listen to punk music but to make it their own by starting their own
bands or writing their own songs.91
Riot Grrrl took this central punk idea and turned it
into a rhetoric of “Do-It-Yourself Feminism,” where girls both consumed culture
associated with Riot Grrrl, such as punk rock music and zines, and also wrote their own
music, started their own newsletters, and even got up on stage during concerts to belt out
a bands’ lyrics in their own voices.92
Importantly, women who identified as part of the
network did not participate in mainstream consumer culture – Riot Grrrl was founded as
and stayed an underground movement. The bands associated with the network refused to
sign with major record labels, and zines were meant to be tools for disseminating a
90
Tobi Vail, who wrote the song, used “surf music” as a metaphor for what she believed punk had
become – so unrevolutionary that it had effectively become poppy “surf music.” See Bikini Kill, “Bikini
Kill Excerpt #1,” in The Riot Grrrl Collection, ed. Lisa Darms (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013), 41.
91
Marcus, 37.
92
Driscoll, 183.

34. Castillo 31
feminist message rather than a good that generated profit.93
In the Riot Grrrl movement,
girls empowered themselves, rather than buying power from the consumer market.
The Riot Grrrl’s loud, culture-rejecting, self-producing form of feminism did not
receive much positive press, demonstrating that even as popular culture became saturated
with images of female empowerment, not all media outlets were willing to endorse such
unfettered an image of female autonomy. The first widely disseminated article on the
Riot Grrrls came in August 1992, when a reporter from USA Today named Elizabeth
Snead snuck into a Riot Grrrl workshop on rape and turned her observations into an
article titled, “Feminist Riot Grrrls Don’t Just Wanna Have Fun.” The article criticized
the Riot Grrrls as “teen angsters,” “self-absorbed” and, ironically, as having little interest
in politics. In a move akin to the popular misrepresentation of second-wave feminists as
butch and ugly, she described them as “sport[ing] hairy legs, army boots and tattoos.”94
Perhaps most injuriously, she described the members’ debates on sexual assault, rape,
body image, and other forms of oppression as “strictly, like, girl talk,” quoting one girl as
arguing that “if you ask a man to touch your left breast and he touches your right, ‘that’s
rape.’”95
Snead’s sharp tone in the article and her selective quotations served to trivialize
the movement and its cause, insinuating that girls were incapable of holding important
conversations that could lead to social, political or individual change. Her quotes
portrayed the Riot Grrrls as childish or stupid and she cited that, even after hours of
93
Of course, this also meant, as Kristen Schilt has noted, that zines were often produced by
middle-class participants who could afford the costs associated with making a zine, including taking time
off from work (or in many of the participants’ cases, school), paying for paper, and covering printing costs
(Schilt in Reger, 41); Zeisler, 107.
94
Elizabeth Snead, “Feminist Riot Grrrls Don’t Just Wanna Have Fun,” USA Today, August 7,
1992, LexisNexis Academic (accessed February 26, 2014).
95
Ibid.

35. Castillo 32
conversation, “nothing is decided,” bringing the entire purpose of the group and its
discussions into question.96
A few months after Snead’s account, Newsweek published a story called
“Revolution, Girl Style,” which similarly belittled the Riot Grrrls and their purpose.
Although the article described the movement’s activism more accurately than Snead in
USA Today, it still trivialized the movements’ members, portraying one interviewee as
writing “very feminist, very gushy essays,” and calling her work “a bundle of
contradictions. She uses Hit It or Quit It [her zine] to gush about some ‘incredibleee [sic]
cute bass player,’ but she started a pro-choice group when she was 12.”97
Again, a
prominent news source negated Riot Grrrl’s importance as a feminist movement by
describing it as childish, with members not yet mature enough to know how to spell
“incredibly” correctly.98
Riot Grrrl, with its inflammatory message, became the perfect
target for a historically feminist-phobic news culture, which derided the movement with
gusto. Feminist imagining that broke out of the independent and consuming neoliberal
norm did not receive the same endorsement as images of empowered females in popular
culture.
The Riot Grrrls demonstrate the consequences for third-wave feminist movements
that rejected neoliberal visions feminism, including engagement with popular culture and
96
Ibid.
97
Farai Chideya, “Revolution, Girl Style,” Newsweek, November 23, 1992, 85.
98
These articles also demonstrate the all-too-easy critique of third-wave feminism as being very
young. While second-wave feminism coined the spelling “womyn,” third-wave feminists (especially young
ones) often referred to themselves as “girls.” The phrase was meant to be empowering, pointing out that
even young people could engage with and find meaning in a political movement. The name Riot Grrrl was
meant to emphasize both the youth of the women involved and their anger through the growl-like “grrr”
that the placed the softer “gir” of “girl.” However, the media would time and time again criticize this
youthfulness that was supposed to give the movement power. See Jennifer Eisenhauer, “Mythic Figures
and Lived Identities: Locating the ‘Girl’ is Feminist Discourse,” in Harris, 79-89; Douglas, 44.

36. Castillo 33
consumer participation. However, even groups that seemed to strictly iterate a neoliberal
feminist message came under media scrutiny. One such group was the British pop
sensation, the Spice Girls. The group consisted of five female singers between the ages of
19 and 23: Melanie Brown (Mel B), Melanie Chrisholm (Mel C), Emma Bunton, Geri
Halliwell, and Victoria Adams (now known as Victoria Beckham). They would become
immortalized, however, in their respective nicknames of Scary Spice, Sporty Spice, Baby
Spice, Ginger Spice, and Posh Spice. The singers began their ascent to fame in 1995
when their demo tape found its way onto the desk of producer Simon Fuller, who signed
them with Virgin Records.99
By 1996, they had a hit single called Wannabe, which was
released in the United States in 1997, and sold over 2 million copies worldwide.100
The Spice Girls spouted a feminist rhetoric more akin to advertisements featuring
powerful women than to the rage-filled songs of the Riot Grrrls. They made declarations
that were a bit more risky than Coca Cola’s supplication that women could choose their
own soft drink (namely Coke), crafting quotable statements such as, “The future is
female!” or “We’re all mad! We’re in a bizarre world so you’ve got to be made to live in
it.”101
But they did not angrily scream out lyrics, write songs about rape, or scrawl the
word “slut” over their exposed flesh.102
They at once called themselves feminists but not-
99
Fuller would later go on to launch the reality TV show American Idol.
100
Paul Lester, Spice Girls: The Unauthorized, Illustrated Story (London: Hamlyn, 1997), 36.
101
The Spice Girls,5, 49.
102
The Spice Girls also failed to bring race into their feminist/not-feminist discourse. While Mel B
(Scary Spice) was black, neither she nor any of the other Spice Girls really addressed her race or how it
might make her experience as a pop star different than the other, white, singers. While not publicly
addressing race is not necessarily problematic, the fact that magazines regularly exoticized her by putting
her in leopard print pants, was.

37. Castillo 34
feminists, declaring that “feminism has become a dirty word,” and deciding to coin103
what they called the “nineties way of saying it”: Girl Power.104
Girl Power was yet
another incarnation of the images of empowered women on television or in movies or
advertisements, a way of inspiring girls to embrace their own power as feminine females.
The Spice Girls encouraged their fans to get in touch with their inner, girly strength, and
also often displayed their own, refusing to act demure and often snubbing common
societal rules. For example, when Chris Heath interviewed the group for Rolling Stone
Magazine, one of his first interactions with Mel B involved her gifting him a clump of
her hair, quipping, “I want to give the young man a lock of my hair.”105
In another
instance, one of the singers pinched Prince Charles on the behind during a press event.
The Wannabe music video showed the five girls wreaking havoc at the St. Pancras Grand
Hotel in London, pulling tablecloths off tables, doing backflips along the buffet, and
generally harassing the hotel’s guests by stealing their drinks and dancing with them. All
of these behaviors encouraged a new kind of aggressive femininity, a louder way of
expressing oneself as a girl. It also, to some extent, challenged normative gender roles
and narratives. Mel B’s gift of a lock of hair to Heath changed a stereotypically romantic
gesture into a repulsive one; the act of pinching a prince casts men in the role of attractors
of unwanted sexual attention. However, the Spice Girls never called for a revolution, as
the Riot Grrrls did, or asked why girls needed empowering in the first place. The group
103
The Spice Girls did not, in fact, coin the phrase Girl Power; it had been around since at least the
early 1990s, if not before. They were, however, the first people to claim it as their “ideology” and it was
due to the pop group that the phrase became so widely recognizable and so closely associated with third-
wave feminism. Marisa Meltzer, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music (New York: Faber and
Faber, 2010), 73.
104
Quoted in Jessica K. Taft, “Girl Power Politics: Pop-Culture Barriers and Organizational
Resistance,” in Harris, 71.
105
Chris Heath, “Spice Girls: Too Hot to Handle,” Rolling Stone, July 10, 1997, Academic Search
Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed February 26, 2014).

38. Castillo 35
may have been outrageous, but they did not encourage girls to think about the roots of
female oppression.
The Spice Girls also offered a portrait of neoliberal feminism in that their
message was easily commodified. By 1998 the group had not only sold 20 million
records, made a movie, published a book, and issued several magazines, but had also
started a line of products called “Bits ‘n’ Bobs,” which included key rings, knee socks,
backpacks, and T-shirts with slogans such as “girls rule!” or “girl power!” written on
them.106
The Spice Girls may have behaved in an aggressive, non-normative fashion, but
as a group, they were strongly linked to the most socially acceptable expression of female
empowerment during the 1990s: shopping. 107
Yet even as the Spice Girls demonstrated a much tamer form of female
empowerment than that of the Riot Grrrls, press sources (in an uncanny similarity to the
coverage of the Riot Grrrls) questioned the singers’ maturity and intelligence. For
example, in 1998 Vogue ran a feature on the group in which a journalist named Jonathan
Van Meter portrayed the girls as vapid, stupid, and “cartoonish.”108
He described the
group’s photoshoot for the magazine as “play[ing] dress up” and was quick to point out
how they “coo[ed] and giggle[d]” when the photographer informed them that he would
use a wind machine on set.109
Having introduced the group with this infantilizing
106
Lester, 51.
107
In an essay comparing Girl Power feminism and Reviving Ophelia, Marnina Gonick argues that
“Girl Power is a marketable concept that has been exploited for its commercial potential.” The many
proliferations of Girl Power products related to the Spice Girls, and their own subsequent commodification
certainly supports her claim. See Gonick, 11.
108
Van Meter, 135.
109
Ibid., 134.

39. Castillo 36
language, he went on to compare the Spice Girls’ message of Girl Power to the pop
singer Madonna’s music, stating,
When she [Madonna] burst forth fifteen years ago she had a point of view,
however strangely articulated at times. Sex = Power, Safe Sex = Smart,
Express Yourself, yadda yadda yadda. In Madonna’s nimble hands, these
ideas came off as fresh and edgy. The Spice Girls offer up the same
messages in an attempt at seriousness, but they feel a bit stale and
cartoonish. Madonna concocted her strange, messy brew of post-feminism
without ever giving it a cute name.110
Even though the Spice Girls created a limited feminist message that did not question,
negate or threaten hegemonic power structures, the media still derided them. Such glib
comments suggest that popular magazines such as Vogue or, as examined later, Rolling
Stone, still felt an impulse to undermine and control any manifestation of feminism,
regardless of the constraints on its message. Much as Time declared popular culture not
feminist enough, Van Meter declared music a silly way of expressing feminist politics.
Aside from calling the Spice Girls childish and inferior to Madonna, he also trivialized
the other singer’s music, summarizing her message as “Express Yourself, yadda yadda
yadda,” insinuating that her message did not warrant a full explanation, and questioning
that message’s intelligibility. Feminism in music, according to Van Meter’s article, was
akin to gibberish. Furthermore, women attempting to convey a message that they saw as
feminist through music were either “strange,” like Madonna, or immature, like the Spice
Girls. In this way, the Spice Girls also fell under the constraint of the mass media, which
framed the group to appear as tame and non-threatening as possible.
The problem with feminism in the 1990s was not, as Time suggested, that it did
not count as feminism. Female empowerment and taking pride in being a girl formed a
110
Ibid., 135.

40. Castillo 37
large part of third-wave feminist rhetoric. The problem with feminism in the 1990s, at
least as it appeared in popular culture, was that the media constrained and ridiculed it,
bleaching out its political potential, making it safe. In a way, this trend reflects a theme
available in popular films: that of the constraint of female power. Media scholar Sue
Short has noted that fictional females with some sort of supernatural power in fantastical
narratives often have limits to their power, or eventually find it stripped away from them.
She argues that, as empowered (or supernatural) women are often seen as threatening to
patriarchal cultures, these restrictions of power “seem to confirm that a continued
patriarchal dominance operates within contemporary narratives.”111
Although the Spice
Girls were not fictional characters with superpowers, they did display a wild, non-
normative femininity and vocalized ideas about female power. Reports such as Van
Meter’s, which infantilized and ridiculed the group, certainly took away some of the
group’s power by discrediting them.
Media sources also tamed the Spice Girls’ image by commodifying and
objectifying the group. For example, a 1997 Rolling Stone cover effectively fetishized the
singers by dressing them all in dominatrix-style black leather. The cover marketed the
Spice Girls as sex objects, offering them up for visual consumption by an explicitly male
gaze. The interior article by Mark Heath further served to commodity the group, treating
each member as a consumer good. For example, it included a physical “cut out ‘n’ keep
guide to the five Spice Girls,” which documented certain trivia facts about each member,
including her age, her Spice Girl name, the professions of her parents (and whether or not
her parents were alive), and a few fun tidbits, such as “Mel B [Scary Spice] used to have
111
Sue Short, Misfit Sisters: Screen Horror as Female Rites of Passage (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006), 13, 21.

41. Castillo 38
a boogie collection behind her bunk bed,” or “Melanie [Sporty Spice]…wears a lot of
Adidas112
sportswear.”113
The fact that Heath labeled this section a “cut out ‘n’ keep
guide” indicates these facts’ status as commodities, to be kept by readers as their own
personal possessions. The article went on to include “personal glimpse[s]” of the pop
group, documenting personal details such as, “When a Spice Girl goes back to her hotel
room at the end of the day, tired but satisfied, she may bathe and put on a dressing gown,
and she will want to put her hair up. Sometimes she will use a scrunchy, but as often as
not…she will sit on her bed, watching TV or reading or talking on the telephone or
thinking, with a pair of underpants twisted into her hair.”114
This glimpse into the Spice
Girls’ end-of-day routine further commodified the group, erasing norms of privacy
enjoyed by non-celebrities, marketing them and their private life as consumable objects.
The Spice Girls themselves, as well as their message, were absorbed into American
consumer culture and thus made completely unthreatening, confined to a space where
female empowerment could only occur through neoliberal acts of independent
consumerism.
Feminism was not dead by 1998, but its manifestations in popular culture were
often manufactured and shaped to conform to a neoliberal imagining of the term. While
not all incarnations of third-wave feminism occurred within the restricting forces of
popular culture, those that did, as the Spice Girls demonstrate, were more likely to
portray a commercial, limited form of feminism that did not question or acknowledge the
112
The fact that Heath saw fit to mention the brand of sportswear Melanie favored is another
example of Girl Power and its association with consumer goods, even when not explicitly connected to the
singing group.
113
Heath.
114
Ibid.

42. Castillo 39
hegemonic, oppressive power structures that feminism often challenged. In this way,
feminism and neoliberalism became intertwined in popular culture, often working
together, but sometimes butting up against one another in new and unexpected ways. The
intersections of feminism, neoliberalism, and their effects on popular texts become
especially clear in the 1997 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show whose
creator has declared was meant to explicitly further a feminist agenda. My next chapter
examines this recorded feminist impulse behind the show, its connection with third-wave
ideology, and how it might further illuminate how neoliberalism influenced, limited and
shaped feminist imagery in popular culture during the 1990s.

43. Castillo 40
CHAPTER 2
MAJORITY STRENGTH:
NEOLIBERAL LIMITATIONS AND MEDIA CONSTRAINT IN BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
The first episode of the 1997 television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer begins
with a broken window. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, break into Sunnydale High
School, the boy eagerly destroying a classroom window in order to gain entry. The girl
with him, blonde, timid, and tense, follows him through the deserted hallways, finally
jumping out of his arms, asking if he hears something. They both pause to listen, the boy
joking, “Maybe it’s some thing,” but nevertheless checks to make sure that they truly are
alone. Even as the boy assures his companion that no one else is in the building, the girl
has doubts. She stares down the hallway, eyes wide; the boy stares at her, hungrily eyeing
her neck. Finally satisfied that there is, in fact, nothing to be afraid of, the girl turns back
to the boy, her face simultaneously morphing into a horrific, ghoulish mask, her teeth
sharpening and elongating. With a growl, she bites into his neck and begins to suck his
blood, pulling him out of the camera’s frame.115
In an audio commentary of the episode, the show’s creator, executive producer,
and frequent writer and director, Joss Whedon, explains his choices behind this opening
sequence, stating, “Anyone who’s well-versed in horror movies knows exactly what’s
going to happen in this scene, and we always try to surprise [those people familiar with
horror], to subvert the obvious.”116
In this case, the “obvious” in need of subverting is the
expectation that the helpless, blonde, scared girl, lured into a deserted high school by a
115
“Welcome to the Hellmouth,” disc 1, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season,
DVD (Los Angeles: 20th
Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2001).
116
Joss Whedon, “Commentary: Welcome to the Hellmouth,” disc 1, Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
The Complete First Season

44. Castillo 41
potential lover, will die at the hands of a monster. Instead, the blonde girl turns out to be
the monster, the boy becoming her helpless victim. As she reveals her horrific face, the
helpless blonde girl defies the genre of horror that she also embodies, challenging the
conventions that usually dictate her doom. In this way, the first minutes of Buffy the
Vampire Slayer (hereafter referred to as Buffy) contain two moments of rupture: first, the
broken window that starts the conventional horror narrative, and second the shattering of
the audience’s presumptions regarding the blonde girl’s fate, and its consequential
destruction of the expected horror narrative.
Whedon describes Buffy as a show with the “mission statement” of “Nothing is as
it seems,” and a title character “who has no patience for a horror movie, who is not going
to be a victim.”117
Just as it opened with a blonde girl refusing to succumb to her
conventional status as horror-movie victim, for seven seasons the show followed the
adventures of a small, blonde girl who not only rejected her horror trope of victim, but
was destined to save the world from vampires and other demons intent on destroying it.
Set in the fictional Southern California town of Sunnydale, the show granted Buffy a new
monster to fight and conquer each week, which she repeatedly did, often with a little bit
of help from her friends. She was, Whedon declared, “the cute little girl in the room” who
“blows everybody out of the water” by being more than anyone ever expected.118
Whedon also believed that Buffy had the potential to not only change and “bust”
traditional horror tropes, but to also subvert and challenge sexism in American culture. A
self-identified feminist, Whedon wanted his show to not only empower the fictional
117
Ibid.
118
Joss Whedon, interviewed by Lisa Rosen, “New Media Guru: Meet Joss Whedon the Web
Slayer,” in Lavery and Burkhead, 172.

45. Castillo 42
blonde horror victim, but to use the icon of a young, demon-fighting, ultra-powerful girl
as a means of teaching adolescent boys to value women.119
In interviews, he explained,
“Creating Buffy is about creating not just a character who can take care of herself, but a
world that accepts that.” He pointed to Buffy’s male friends and male mentor, noting,
“She’s surrounded by men who not only don’t mind that she takes charge in a situation
but find it kind of sexy…it’s kind of Utopian, this group of people.”120
More importantly,
he argued that the creation of a world where people did not ridicule women in charge –
who, in fact, wanted a strong woman leader and respected that leadership – needed to
happen within the realm of popular culture. “The idea of changing culture is important to
me,” he declared in a 2002 interview with the New York Times, “and it can only be done
in a popular medium.”121
Such a declaration, much like Buffy’s group of friends, seems a bit utopian,
considering the continued suppression and control of images of powerful women, even
when popular culture seemed to endorse it.122
However, just one year after the show aired
(and a few months after Time declared feminism dead), George magazine named Sarah
Michelle Gellar, the actor who portrayed Buffy, the second most fascinating woman in
119
Joss Whedon, interviewed by Emily Nussbaum, “Must See Metaphysics,” in Lavery and
Burkhead, 66.The fact that Whedon chose a popular medium in which to further a feminist message does
not mean that he only sees feminism as belonging in the popular realm. He has worked with Equality Now,
an international human rights organization dedicated to ending violence against women around the world,
for a number of years, and a few of his speeches for the organization regarding the necessity of feminism
have been circulated on the Internet. In interviews, he also talks about feminism as more than just creating
a strong female character for television, demonstrating substantial understanding of how patriarchy silences
and devalues women, as well as his desire to bring attention to misogyny that remains “unspoken or even
unknown” in society. See Joss Whedon, interviewed by S.F. Said,“Joss Whedon – About Buffy, Alien, and
Firefly: The Shebytches.com Interview,” in Lavery and Burkhead, 140.
120
Joss Whedon, interviewed by James Longworth, “Joss Whedon, Feminist,” in Lavery and
Burkhead, 58-59.
121
Nussbaum in Lavery and Burkhead, 65, emphasis mine.
122
See chapter 1.

46. Castillo 43
politics. Although neither Gellar nor Buffy held public office, ran political campaigns, or
even made overtly political statements about voting or presidential candidates, the article
argued that the show essentially created political change in America by giving girls a
positive and capable role model to look up to.123
George’s decision to include Sarah
Michelle Gellar in an article titled “The 20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics”
certainly strengthened Whedon’s claim that the popular could change culture and affect
the country’s political climate.
Of course, it is important to ask what type of change Buffy advocated, and how
media sources interpreted that change. While Whedon hoped that Buffy would confront
and challenge a patriarchal and misogynistic culture, most media sources lauded Buffy for
its individual empowerment of its female hero. Rather than talking about Buffy’s close
relationship with her friends, both female and male, or the show’s often obvious
references to sexual assault, popular magazines, similarly to George, praised Buffy for
giving girls a strong role model who could teach them to stand up for themselves.124
Although a praiseworthy goal, the media’s myopic tendency to only report on the impact
of Buffy as it related to girls’ confidence correlated with a neoliberal encouragement of
individual empowerment that ignored greater issues of gender, race and class inequalities
in the United States. Furthermore, Buffy’s existence as a popular text disseminated in a
popular medium unavoidably restricted Buffy in its overall portrayal of feminism. While
it did reach more people than it would have in the form of a lecture series on PBS, it was
123
Debbie Stoller, “The 20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics: Sarah Michelle Gellar,” George,
September 1998, 110-112.
124
See, for example, Debbie Stoller, “Brave New Girls: These TV Heroines Know What Girl
Power Really Means,” On the Issues, Fall 1998,
http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1998fall/fall98_Stoller.php (accessed February 26, 2014); Ginia
Bellafante and Jeanne McDowell, “Bewitching Teen Heroines,” Time, May 5, 1997, 82.

47. Castillo 44
also subject to the restrictions of the neoliberal culture in which it was created, as well as
advertisers wishing to profit from the show and consumer tie-ins that ignored and even
overrode Whedon’s stated feminist intentions.125
Whedon’s interviews suggest that he
envisioned his show, much like the characters in its first scene, breaking into a
misogynistic American consciousness and subverting it. However, rather than becoming
an agent of rupture, Buffy became more a site of muddled confusion, a mixture of third-
wave ideology and limited, neoliberal understandings of female empowerment.
In this chapter, I explore Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a text created with feminist
intent operating within a neoliberal culture. I begin by exploring the political inspiration
behind Buffy, its failed incarnation as a movie, and its success as a television show five
years later. I argue that the moment in which Buffy became popular corresponds with a
rise in neoliberal anxiety related to low self-esteem in adolescent girls, and unpack how
Buffy’s positive reception in 1997 may have resulted from its compatibility with a
neoliberal rhetoric of self-empowerment. I then examine how this compatibility
influenced Buffy’s overall aesthetic and narrative choices. I ultimately argue that although
the show often demonstrates moments of feminist intent, it also presents Buffy as a
preferred white, middle-class, neoliberal citizen, which somewhat muddles its portrayals
of feminist images. Furthermore, magazines such as Time and On the Issues produced
articles during Buffy’s first year on television reminiscent to Rolling Stone’s on the Spice
Girls, which limited and fetishized the show’s title character. These articles claimed to
125
Whedon often seriously joked that it was “better to be a spy in the house of love,” because “If I
made ‘Buffy the Lesbian Separatist,’ a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one
would be coming to the party, and it would be boring” (Joss Whedon, interviewed by Emily Nussbaum,
“Must-See Metaphysics,” in Lavery and Burkhead, 65). Ironically, he now has several short speeches on
the importance of feminism circulating the internet. See Joss Whedon, “Equality is Like Gravity,”
Youtube.com, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsamFmWCkvo (accessed February 28, 2014).

48. Castillo 45
admire Buffy’s kung-fu skills, but spent most of their pages talking about her fashion
sense and consumer behaviors, and even fetishized and objectified her with victimizing
publicity stills. Under neoliberal images and media constraint, Buffy became a muddled
text, successfully communicating neither a wholly feminist message nor a wholly
neoliberal one, but oscillating between the two, failing – or perhaps refusing – to produce
a clear and cohesive meaning.
When Whedon tells the story behind the creation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he
begins with his thought process behind the 1992 movie that would eventually inspire the
television show. Tired of watching horror movies in which blonde, sexy, “bouncy and
frivolous” girls fell victims to psychotic killers, Whedon decided that popular culture
needed a female icon who not only stood up to any monster that attacked her, but beat it
to a pulp in the bargain.126
Although Whedon still stands by his script as “a good,
responsible, feminist, exciting, enjoyable movie,”127
the film flopped.128
Few people saw
it, fewer critics liked it, and hardly anyone bothers to write about it anymore unless they
want to retrospectively marvel at its awfulness. Now summed up as a “crapmound film”
126
Whedon explicitly created Buffy to invert common stereotypes involving female victimization,
especially in horror films. He stated that his ideal movie trailer for Buffy would depict a girl walking by
herself in a dark alley, accompanied by a threatening voiceover: “‘It’s a bad town to be in, especially a
night…Especially if you’re alone.’ And then the monster attacks her and she kills it. ‘And especially if
you’re a vampire.” Joss Whedon, interviewed by Tasha Robinson, “The Onion A.V. Club Interview with
Joss Whedon (2),” in Burkhead and Lavery, 152.
Whedon consistently took pride in this “genre-busting” that created “a hero where [there] had always been
a victim.” Joss Whedon, “Commentary: Welcome to the Hellmouth.”
127
A clarification: Whedon still stands by his script as all of these things, but he has long ago
forsaken the actual movie, admitting that it did not turn out at all the way that he had hoped. It is very
difficult, he says, to write a script but not direct it, because, in the end, the movie’s director will always
have a “different vision” (Joss Whedon, interviewed by Tasha Robinson, “The Onion A.V. Club Interview
with Joss Whedon (1),” in Lavery and Burkhead, 24). Perhaps this is why Whedon was so involved with
Buffy as a television show, looking over and editing every script before filming, often giving directions to
the directors he hired, and refusing to finalize an episode until he was completely satisfied.
128
Joss Whedon, interviewed by James Longworth, “Joss Whedon, Feminist,” in Lavery and
Burkhead, 53.

49. Castillo 46
by Entertainment Weekly, reviewers at the time declared it “[not] heinous, just
disposable,” and “a lot more painless than would have been expected.”129
It barely made
a splash in the marketplace and disappeared without much comment or concern.
Buffy’s initial failure to thrive in popular culture in 1992 points to its (low)
quality, but also a confusion regarding its genre and its point. Although the script had its
moments – a reviewer from the New York Times, while nonplussed with the film, enjoyed
lines such as “All I want to do is graduate high school, go to Europe, marry Christian
Slater and die” – almost everyone recognized that the movie was a strange blend of
horror, camp, and bad acting.130
Several reviews of the film also demonstrated a
confusion regarding how to view or label the movie. Rolling Stone decided that it was a
failed “comic romance about a mall doll who finds more to life than shopping,” and the
New York Times labeled it a “prom-queen” flick, possibly sprinkled with some “political
import.”131
However, the reviewer was much more interested in “Ms. Swanson’s funny,
deadpan delivery” than the film’s political potential, and even lamented the plot’s pivotal
point of Buffy becoming a vampire Slayer, stating that the movie “loses speed during
Buffy’s transformation into a pompon-waving woman warrior [sic]. Her conversion may
129
Marc Bernardin, “A Joss Whedon-less ‘Buffy’ Movie: Worst Idea Ever of the Year,”
Entertainment Weekly, May 26, 2009, http://popwatch.ew.com/2009/05/26/new-buffy-movie/ (accessed
February 26, 2014).
130
Janet Maslin, “Review/Film; She’s Hunting Vampires, and on a School Night,” New York
Times, July 31, 1992,
http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9E0CE6DC163DF932A05754C0A964958260 (accessed
February 16, 2014; Joss Whedon, interviewed by Roger Ash, “Westfield Comics Joss Whedon Interview,”
in Lavery and Burkhead, 24-25.
131
Peter Travers, “Review: Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Rolling Stone, 31 July, 1992,
http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/reviews/buffy-the-vampire-slayer-19920731 (accessed 16 February,
2014); Maslin.