Queering the Slayer-text: reading possibilities in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Of the dominant trends of lesbian representation in the last decade of the twentieth, and early twenty-first century, there are two that stretch in entirely different directions, but which are both pertinent to a discussion of the textual and subtextual lesbianisms in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There is the normalised gay (and I mean ‘gay’ rather than lesbian), and there is the ‘polymorphously perverse’, uncanny, and monstrous queer. I believe that the portrayal of lesbianism in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, takes both of these trends, and plaits them together to create what is truly a strange, sometimes problematic, sometimes positive, but ultimately unique portrait of lesbianism.