While the grotesque body of Bakhtin's theory has been taken up in feminist discourse on both camp and the abject, particular political and potentially feminist dimensions of the grotesque body as a site of communal transformation and liberation have yet to be elucidated. Whereas discourse on both camp and the abject imagine the grotesque body as the exemplary exceptional within the realm of the normal, effectively reinscribing hierarchical dichotomy in the challenge to it, Bakhtin's notion of carnival makes the grotesque body the center about which the political dimensions of space are reconfigured. This notion of a transformative liminal space, figured by the contradictory and perpetually incomplete body, finds resonance and resistance in both Anzaldua's liberatory allegory of the Borderlands and Haraway's emancipatory myth of the Cyborg. Using Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) as a platform of analysis, I trace the connections between Bakhtin, Anzaldua, and Haraway, arguing that a reconfigured carnival spirit finds its way into the political metaphorics of the Borderlands, the Cyborg, and through them, into BtVS.[1] These three figurations of the grotesque make visible diverse modes of "monstrous" reproduction which call into question Kent Ono's assertion that BtVS "privileges an antiseptic white culture" (Ono 164) and "insists that hierarchies of race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality are normal and necessary" (Ono 169). Not all of these figurations of the grotesque map equally well onto BtVS and where they clash and contrast, fissures, problems, and the liberatory limits of both BtVS and the theories themselves are revealed.

Writing in the early twentieth century, Mikhail Bakhtin authored Rabelais and His World, a work of literary criticism that not only expounded on Francois Rabelais, but also serves as a treatise on folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Central to both these projects is the carnival, a ritual time where all ranks and rules of life are dissolved in contradiction, excess, and laughter. For Bakhtin, the carnival is a profoundly liberating space, one that is irresistible and life-giving. In "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" Donna Haraway creates the myth of the "ironic" and "blasphemous" (Haraway 149) cyborg, a creature that is both human and machine, a being who embraces partial perspectives, lived contradiction, and kinship with machines and animals (Haraway 154). The cyborg expresses disenchantment with grand narratives, unity, and the dualisms that ensue under such a mandate. For Haraway, the cyborg is to express socialist-feminism without damning technology or machine skill, a trend that she worried was entirely too prevalent in feminist praxis. The cyborg is also conceived as a monster who challenges gender and other "natural" categories. In Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua creates a mythopoetic and personal history of colonialism and endurance in the Southeastern region of the United States. Merging poetry and prose, English and Spanish, Anzaldua details her struggle to lay claim to all parts of herself, against cultural demands for oppressive (and often racist, sexist, or homophobic) unity. The metaphor of the Borderlands has been influential in post-colonial and critical theory, shifting discourse away from "the margins" as the place where difference is exiled, to thinking about difference as the place "physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy" (Anzaldua 19), that is, as a site of conflict, encounter, and potential transformation.

Like carnival, television is also "a second world and a second life outside officialdom, a world in which all…people participat[e], more or less, in which they liv[e] during a given time of year" (Bakhtin 6). Like carnival, people enter into the world of television at certain repetitive and ritualistically determined times, particularly if they are fans, caught up in the story of a particular show. Though viewership is conditioned by the lens of one's own experience and worldview, when television watchers enter the story of a show, they leave the rules that bind their lives behind in their experience of that show. Both television and carnival represent escape from the ordinary, the humdrum, and from officialdom. During both television shows, especially one such as BtVS, and carnival, spectators/participants may experience "temporary liberation from the prevailing truths and from the established order….mark[ing] the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions" (Bakhtin10). Although one consumes and participates without regard to rank for both of these respective activities, there are important differences in the way that lack of rank is experienced.[2] Unlike carnival, people do not participate in television spectatorship in the bodily sense; they cannot actually enter the realm of the show themselves. While laughter, particularly in a show like BtVS, is meant to flow in both directions, where the characters laugh at themselves (and sometimes the audience) and the audience laughs at the characters and themselves, this laughter does not echo. It is not the degrading and rebirthing laughter of carnival, but the laughter of spectatorship. The characters on a show may demonstrate their incompleteness via their destruction and rebirth through laughter, but the show itself is complete and closed in a way that carnival is not. Nonetheless, television shows, particularly one such as BtVS, can function as a liminal space and provide a site for the expression and consumption of the "…popular, festive, [and] indestructible" (Bakhtin 33) carnival spirit. As a pop culture production, the people's "second world" (Bakhtin 6) with feminist aspirations, BtVS provides a near-ideal postmodern site (Pender 2002) at which to investigate the resonance of Bakhtin's theory in the postmodern and its potentially liberatory politics.

The heart of the carnival, the Borderlands, and the myth of the Cyborg is the grotesque body. For Bakhtin, as for Haraway and Anzaldua, "the grotesque body… is always unfinished, outgrows itself, transgresses its own limits" (Bakhtin 26). In all of these theories, the grotesque body is structured around the perpetual troubling of boundaries. For Bakhtin, the grotesque body "is blended with the world, with animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements" (Bakhtin 27). Similarly "cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine" (Haraway 176). The mestiza/queer figure of the Borderlands also represents a kind of "grotesque" blending - the familiar blended with the strange, simultaneously recognizable and transgressive. The grotesque body requires a liminal space outside officialdom, literally the carnival and the Borderlands. For Haraway the cyborg also requires an outside space organized around different values in which to exist and resist: "the cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family…the cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden…"(Haraway 151). Though Bakhtin claims that the realm of the carnival is extrapolitcal, as this quote signals, the "outside" of society and what signifies that outside is itself always already contoured by the political, understood in relation to it. Though all these incomplete, contradictory, mutable, grotesque bodies are figures of liberation, as we will explore through BtVS, the politics behind and configuring each particular grotesque body in each theory are significantly different, though resonant.

In carnival, as in the Borderlands, and the myth of the cyborg, the space of liminality serves to "consecrate inventive freedom, to permit the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, to liberate from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted" (Bakhtin 34). To begin with, BtVS is literally outside the regime of the normal, as it takes place in a speculative universe where magic and vampires are real. But besides this initial conceit which it shares with other shows, BtVS uses what Haraway calls blasphemy and irony (Haraway 149) to invert conventions, truths, and clichés, and thus to liberate. The premise of the show is a subversion that is both ironic and faithful to a major cliché of horror movies and femininity: Joss Whedon intentionally created BtVS as an inversion of the horror movie scene in which the blond girl runs into an alley, the bad guy/monster follows, the girl is killed, and the bad guy/monster walks out victorious. In Whedon's defining image of BtVS, the blonde girl walks out of the alley dusting her hands and the monster is dead. But rather than become a solitary hero in the Western tradition, Buffy subverts this cliché and creates a community to support her in her heroic otherness.[3] Aside from subversions built into the show itself, individual episodes often feature "turnabouts" and reversals of expected events, as when the Mothers Oppose the Occult (MOO), a group headed by Buffy's mother, attempts to burn Buffy, Willow, and Amy at the stake ("Gingerbread" 3011) or when the expected "training montage" a la The Karate Kid becomes a song of farewell and mourning in the musical ("Once More, With Feeling" 6007). Finally, the show even subverts its own clichés. Every episode in the first two seasons, and the first episode of every season after that, begins with the male bass intoning "[i]nto each generation a Slayer is born. One girl in all the world, a Chosen One. One born with the strength and skill to fight the vampires, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers."[4] But after Buffy dies the first time and is brought back to life ("Prophesy Girl" 1012), there are perpetually two slayers (first Kendra, who joins Buffy and then is killed in Season Two, thus bringing Faith into her Slayer powers in Season Three), sometimes in cooperation, sometimes in conflict. The ideology of "One girl in all the world" is broken, and the show itself is shown to be continually incomplete, contradictory and a site structured by the "peculiar logic of the 'inside out,' of the turnabout" (Bakhtin 11). Such incompleteness speaks to the constant unraveling and revelation of truths.

The structure of BtVS reflects another important aspect of carnival: the significance of laughter and contradiction. Laughter is the sign of the burying and rebirth of the grotesque body and thus, it is laughter that makes carnival a site of regeneration. This laughter is profoundly equalizing, for "[a]ll that was frightening in ordinary life is turned in amusing or ludicrous monstrosities"(Bakhtin 47). That which is frightening becomes liberating, reflecting the irony of Haraway's cyborg, where what has been deeply troubling to feminists, the Western lure of technology and promise, is buried and rebirthed as a metaphor of liberation. BtVS reflects this aspect of the carnival spirit as in the first three seasons, BtVS made monsters metaphors for the angst and travails of teen life, e.g. steroid abuse is depicted as transformation into evil fish creatures ("Go Fish" 2020) and rich fraternity brothers are depicted as demon worshippers who sacrifice women ("Reptile Boy" 2005). These monsters are dealt with seriously, but are made simultaneously ludicrous. Buffy continuously jibes at monsters and vampires, making comments such as "alright, I get it, you're evil. Do we have to chat about it all day?" ("Amends" 3010) and "I'm Buffy and you're… history" ("Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" 1005) that disrupt the seriousness of the monsters and render the fearful characters amusing. Buffy invites us into carnival through her puns and buries the monsters as such, recasting them as amusing grotesqueries. Such laughter destabilizes the stable and complete truth of the "evil" of monsters, upsetting the audience's expectation that such a monster can only cause fear and obedience and thus, liberating the viewer temporarily from fear.

However, as in carnival no one laughs from a privileged space protected from laughter: the main characters of BtVS, Buffy, Willow, Xander, and Giles (the core group stable through seven seasons), as well as Spike, Angel, Cordelia, Oz , and Anya, are "those who laugh…[and] they too are incomplete"(Bakhtin 12) and are also laughed at in BtVS. Contradictions between what the character should be, were the character to be whole, complete, and stable, and the truth of contradictory selves is stock amusement for BtVS: ever-competent Buffy herself becomes a cave-girl after drinking Bad Beer and drags a boy she likes off by his hair ("Beer Bad" 4005); Anya, the (mostly) former vengeance demon is shown to be scared of bunnies and is teased for it; Giles, the professional adult, was out of a job all of fourth season; the good Giles is turned into a demon and nearly killed by Buffy, much to Spike's amusement( "A New Man" 4012); Spike calls himself the Big Bad after he is rendered impotent as a vampire through technology and is teased in the fourth season; Oz wakes up naked, defenseless, and outside, after becoming a werewolf during the full moon ("Phases" 2015); Joyce, Buffy's professional and respectable mother, sleeps with Giles after both ate magically treated chocolate that turned them into their teenaged selves ("Band Candy" 3006). The transformations engendered by magic and made real on screen are metaphors for the changes and transformations of real life. Sometimes these are stabilized, as when the "band candy" or "beer" wears off or an enchantment is reversed; other times, contradiction is perpetual, as it is with Buffy, Oz, and Anya. Not only is the audience invited to laugh at these contradictions and transformations, but the characters also frequently make fun of each other. Their selves and self-illusions of wholeness are also continually destroyed and reborn in that laughter, just as the monsters are struck down, by Buffy's wit and work, and rise again.

But are all bodies "equally" grotesque in BtVS? Though the carnival effects of laughter are evident on nearly all characters, BtVS does not display the equality of the carnival, where everyone becomes a participant. As Bakhtin writes, even in the Renaissance "bodies could not be considered for themselves; they represented a material bodily whole and therefore transgress the limits of their isolation. The private and the universal were still blended in contradictory unity"(Bakhtin 23). Bakhtin assumes that all differences between individuals are immaterial in the unity of the grotesque body, such that the grotesque body of one calls forth the carnival spirit of another. Because all differences between people become immaterial, the carnival is an extrapolitical space. In contrast, in the postmodern, the age of hyperliberalism, bodies are so fragmented as to be only for themselves, and the problem becomes one of creating a politics that respects difference, but imagines a collectivity that struggles for justice. As Haraway asks, "[w]hat kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective, and ironically, socialist feminist?" (Haraway 157) Rather than displaying carnivalesque equality between all characters on BtVS that would negate the structure of good/evil and thus be extrapolitical, the main characters form a community together, called the Scooby gang. As we will see, this community reflects a partial answer to Haraway's question. Where carnival is involuntary and extrapolitical, one must choose to lay claim to all contradictory parts of the self (human and slayer, witch and computer programmer) in order to be a true Mestiza in the Borderlands, which, for Anzaldua, necessitates continual growth, the work of coalition and fighting for justice.[5] Similarly, the cyborg, though created by oppressive power, must chose to engage in the contradictory cyborg politics which similarly demand coalition with and across differences.

The structure of the Scooby gang is similar to both cyborg politics and a coalitional model of politics as espoused in the Borderlands, but refuses the carnival's endorsement of an extrapolitical unity in the grotesque. In the Scooby gang, characters recognize each other in their partial and contradictory selves, but come together in a collective to fight evil (in figures frequently metaphoric of patriarchy). The Scooby gang (in various seasons) is made up of contradictory/incomplete bodies: Buffy herself, both Slayer and high school student (for the first three years), both a "girly girl" and a kickboxing action hero. Her valley-girl-isms, a parodic cuteness of language ("If the apocalypse comes, beep me" in "Never Kill a Boy on the First Date" 1005), combined with her strong punches and kicks, make her amusing, ludicrous, and grotesque. Further, Buffy chooses to create a community rather than engage in traditional heroics, a contradiction with her role as slayer/hero.[6] Willow, Buffy's best friend, is similarly contradictory, as she is a computer nerd, a social outcast, a witch, and lesbian. Oz is a werewolf guitarist; Xander, a sensitive man; Cordelia is both a popularity queen and Scooby member; Anya is a former vengeance demon, high school student, and Magic Shop Manager; Giles is a librarian, formerly "Ripper," and former black arts aficionado, and Buffy's Watcher; finally, Spike is romantic, violently impotent, a Vampire, and later ensouled. Angel, though never a full part of the Scooby gang, often fights with or for Buffy and is himself both a Vampire and ensouled. Though the paradigm of good guys against bad guys is operative in BtVS, the boundaries between good and bad are consistently broken, and an essential "complete" truth of the selves of the characters, refused. Oz is a dangerous werewolf during three nights a month, but a loyal friend; Anya used to be a vengeance demon and become one again after Xander left her at the altar, before being turned back into a human as a punishment. Willow and Xander, conflicted as they are in ordinary life, are shown to be vampires, the ultimate Other of the show, in a near alternate reality ("The Wish" 3009), and Willow herself later becomes evil and attempts to destroy the world ("Two to Go" 6021 and "Grave" 6022).

These contradictions and transformations are accepted, buried, and rebirthed in the cyborg politics/Borderlands space of the Scooby Gang, which allows the Scooby Gang to exist as a community in a literal Borderlands between the human/normal and the demonic/other. What maintains this community is choice; the characters choose - as opposed to the injunction of carnival - to enter into and maintain community with each other in order to fight evil. They maintain a contradictory space where they can maintain their conflicted selves entire and move between worlds, where they can refuse the values of the dominant order even while fighting for justice. This a political space and a political choice - both the cyborg and the Borderlands are birthed involuntarily by oppressive regimes, but speak to the possibility of choosing to actively resist those regimes over time (as opposed to the involuntary and irresistible opposition of the carnival to the status system) through a politics of hybridization, contradiction, and coalition.[7]

This raises the question of who is excluded from the Scooby Gang: if these renderings of the grotesque body do not invoke cosmic participation, who is not permitted to enter the liminal space of transformation? Though this is a Borderlands community, it is also defined through whom it excludes (or who chooses not to become a part of the Scooby gang). In BtVS, certain people cannot enter the Scooby gang: those who are fully human and incapable of seeing the demonic (the "Other") and those who are fully Other, the demonic. That these categories are not absolute and that entrance into the Borderlands community is a choice based on commitment to justice is shown in the treatment of certain characters. Angel, a vampire with a soul, is a Champion who enters the community in Seasons One and Two (before he loses his soul and becomes evil, is resouled, sent to hell, and returned). Similarly, Spike, another vampire, who is implanted with a chip that gives him pain every time he hurts a human being (Season Four), is recuperated into the Borderlands community, where he learns empathy and begins to fight for good on his own. Cordelia, originally a popular girl invested in the dominant (human) order and blind to the demonic, becomes a part of the gang when her eyes are opened. Those who deny the demonic (difference as it is portrayed here) and those who deny the human world are barred from their own choice from entering Buffy's Borderlands community. While Anzaldua's Borderlands is indeed the space of lived contradiction born of imperialism and colonialism, the politics that emerges from it is one of coalition and the creation of community situated between worlds. As we see from the examples above, characters are shown changing, constantly becoming in their Borderlands community, but they maintain this Borderlands community (as opposed to involuntary and temporary invocation of carnival) through their collective commitment to fighting evil.[8]

If the difference between the carnival and postmodern feminist figurations of the carnival is that of choice, how does this impact the configuration of the central "grotesque body" of each theory? The grotesque body is always already political, set within a particular field of values within which it must be read. The grotesque body is grotesque because it inverts dominant hierarchies and ruptures dominant values; it is "…ambivalent and contradictory…. ugly, monstrous, hideous from the point of view of classic aesthetics, that is the aesthetics of the ready-made and the completed" (Bakhtin 25). For Bakhtin "the grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming" (Bakhtin 24). Bakhtin's grotesque body is quintessentially the (laughing) birthing hag, the fetishized image of the morbid maternal, woman's immanent, fleshy, excess. For Bakhtin, "woman" is always already outside, by virtue of her sex, and the carnival is simply an exaggeration of what is already understood to be female/outside. Haraway explicitly refuses the morbid maternal, writing that "holistic politics depend on metaphors of rebirth and invariably call on the resources of reproductive sex. I would suggest that cyborgs have more to do with regeneration and are suspicious of the reproductive matrix and of most birthing" (Haraway 181). Similarly, the two quintessential figures of the Borderlands, the Mestiza, "forerunner of a new race,/half and half - both woman and man, neither - /a new gender… a crossroads"(Anzaldua 216), and the unraced Queer, for " ..[a]s a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races" (Anzaldua 102), both refuse the "reproductive matrix."

The latter formulation here echoes Bakhtin's cosmic unity, however, for Anzaldua this cosmic unity is invoked through a queer sexuality, a mode of being, rather than through the grotesque body of woman, the laughing birthing hag. Haraway refuses the morbid maternal via a scientific metaphor of regeneration that erases gender, materiality, and historicity, while Anzaldua refuses the morbid maternal via a shapeshifting (becoming the other) and creation of community through affinity, both of which are undergirded by a repudiation of patrilineage and childbirth as the primary mode of reproduction/regeneration. All three figures mark otherness, but the cyborg and the mestiza/queer represent a political attempt to reclaim and reinvest otherness with a central place in a new social order. Bakhtin's grotesque body is meant to always be grotesque, it is outside of politics and officialdom and thus does not change them; rather it signals liberation from politics in a cosmic unity based on an always already othered female metamorphosis. In contrast, Anzaldua's and Haraway's figures are meant to invite change that will revalue the "grotesque" and provide a model for an ongoing politics of the grotesque. All three figures represent liberation and utopia, but the explicit politics of the latter two also present political possibility, rather than a liminal liberation which marks release from the political.

Though the main characters of BtVS are incomplete, changing, and contradictory, they resonate with the "grotesque body" of each theory differently and to different degrees. Though a reading of each character in the Scooby gang through the lens of each particular "grotesque body" would prove interesting, as Buffy is the central figure of the show, the investigation will be restricted to her. As Vivian Chen argues in "Buffy? She's Like, She's Not Like Me - She's Rad" that while appearing to endorse (and simultaneously campily undermining) normative whiteness and blondness, Buffy "may harbor an 'inappropriate other' within herself"(Chin 102). For Chen, this "inappropriate other" resonates with racial difference. The "inappropriate other" is at the heart of my discussion of the grotesque, and each theory provides a way to think through the implications of the "inappropriate other." Buffy resonates with the mestiza, the queer, the cyborg, and aspects of Bakhtin's grotesque, but she herself refuses the matrix of the morbid maternal. It is not her fleshy excesses that make her grotesque; rather the grotesque manifests through her modes of "monstrous" reproduction, transgression of subjectivities, and blurring of subject boundaries in a mode of feminist heroics that render her grotesque.

Originally, Buffy's secret identity as the Slayer was meant to stand in for homosexuality. In the Season Two finale, "Becoming," Buffy must come out to her mother, Joyce, after her mother sees her slay a vampire:

However, in the next episode, "Anne," Buffy reclaims her identity as Slayer and returns to Sunnydale to confront her buried demons. The lack of easy reception, in spite of her own coming to terms with her queerness, demonstrates that Buffy's difference comes with a price and marks her as Other. As the queer in all races, in Anzaldua's problematic assertion, Buffy represents the possibility of connection with other Others. In order to survive and hold on to both her (white, American) girlhood and her slayer destiny, she must build a community in which her queerness is acceptable, thus nonsexually reproducing her difference and creating a liminal space of transformation for both herself and others.[11]

Buffy is also a Mestiza figure, walking the borderlands between the demon world and the human world, between "two or more cultures that edge each other" (Anzaldua, 19).[12] Her slayer powers come from the demonic realm, but she herself is ensouled and human. Though she uses her powers against demons, locating herself on the human side, she nonetheless belongs to both worlds. While Buffy longs to be fully a part of the legitimate, human world, when her other side is taken away, she regrets it, longs for her power, and verifies her identity as the Slayer. In "Halloween" (2006) and "Helpless" (3012), Buffy must deal with the world after her powers have been taken away. In "Halloween," her longing to be a pretty princess leads her to purchase (unknowingly) an enchanted costume, one that makes her into a helpless girl. She is nearly eaten by Spike (pre-chip insertion) before Giles breaks the spell and returns her to her Mestiza self. She smiles, says, "It's good to be me" ("Halloween" 2006) and proceeds to fight off Spike and frighten him away. Buffy is bound to both worlds and requires all of her selves to navigate between them. As this episode shows, though she may want to periodically escape from her divided self, she also enjoys her powers and recognizes that they define her self as well.

In "Helpless" (3012) Buffy's watcher Giles injects her with a potion that deprives her of her abilities, a required test of the Slayer on her 18th birthday. In her ignorance, she panics, knowing that she cannot act in the demon world. Giles later confesses his act and she reacts angrily, rightly treating it as a violation of her bodily integrity. When Buffy later goes to confront a vampire who has stolen her mother away (without her powers), Giles follows her to help… and is fired by the council for his actions. Buffy destroys the vampire with her wits and saves her mother. Throughout this episode, Buffy constantly evinces desire for her full powers and regrets that this part of her self was stolen away. She even recognizes that her "Other" self gives her powers in the human world, when she realizes that she cannot confront the boorish men who nearly assault her on her way home. Perpetually torn between cultures, perpetually incomplete, but powerful in the resources of both her selves, BtVS refuses the collapse into one essential identity or another, instead illuminating the dilemma and potential of the Mestiza figure. Although Buffy does build a Borderlands community that supports all of her multiple selves, she remains essentially Other from the other members of the Scooby gang, for her ability and their abilities to move competently in the worlds of demon/human are never comparable.[13] The Borderlands are never ending, never unified, never complete: Buffy is always central and on the margins of her own community. There is no end to the grotesque, only perpetual growth and ongoing encounter with the grotesque.

For Anzaldua, the Borderlands is both a metaphor to describe a liminal place where difference is encountered and transformation takes place, as well as a real place produced by a history of colonialism and imperialism. While the first aspect maps cleanly onto BtVS (see above), the second does not.[14] Acknowledging that this is a polysemous text, I offer some possible mappings of race as it pertains to the Borderlands in BtVS. One possible reading of race is to see Buffy as an imperialist, or someone who has defected to the imperialist side, given that she uses her "demon" powers against vampires and other demons to further the aims of the human world, while simultaneously refusing to exact justice on the human world. This reading substantiates the neocolonialist thesis (Ono).[15] However, if we read colonial relations the other way around, then we see that Buffy has come to an understanding of her demon powers and values that aspect of herself while pursuing justice,[16] an interpretation discussed in the paragraph above. A recent scene from Angel ("Damage" 5011), the BtVS spin-off, offers this potential reversal to the neocolonialist narrative:

Given that magic is a form of technology in BtVS, Buffy is also a Cyborg.[17] She discovers in Season Seven ("Get It Done" 7015) that the first slayer was made when the Shamans (somewhere in "primitive" "Africa") chained a young woman to a stone and unleashed demons on her soul, thus producing a hybrid human/demon: the Slayer. This creation story is also verified by Dracula in the Season 5 ("Buffy vs. Dracula" 5001) who tells Buffy that "All these years fighting us. Your power so near to our own and you've never once wanted to know what it is we fight for."[18] Buffy's power is the mirror image of the vampires; she has their extra-strength and amazing timing, but she retains her human qualities. Indeed, Buffy is the " illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins" (Haraway 151). Created by the masters of the system, the Shamans, Buffy is illegitimate in the sense that she was made without her mother's (or her own) permission. She also proves to be unfaithful to her origins, first by dismissing the Council of Watchers (a patriarchal organization that trains and gives orders to the Slayer through her Watcher) in "Graduation Day" (Part 2, 2020) and thus "graduating" into autonomy and leadership, and second, by refusing the power offered to her by the same Shamans who created the first slayer in "Get It Done" (7015). After she travels to their time/space through magic, the Shamans chain her to the same rock and unleash a demon, the source of her Slayer powers, a transformation that Buffy fears will further destroy her humanity. Buffy fights back, using her Slayer/Cyborg strength to free herself from her chains. She maintains her cyborg body: demonic power (technology) and humanity, refusing to give up either aspect.

Two problems with the cyborg theory arise in conjunction with BtVS: the problem of desire and the problem of power and exploitation. Rather than finding pleasure in the myth of the Garden of Eden, Haraway's cyborg is to find "pleasure in the confusion of boundaries" (Haraway 150). This formulation has several effects. The first is to eroticize the cyborg body itself, while stigmatizing other forms of desire. Buffy herself is unlike a cyborg in that she pursues heterosexual love and romance (Buffy chooses to save Angel in the Season 3 finale despite the impending end of Sunnydale) as well as the protection of family against the call to duty (she refuses to kill her sister Dawn, despite pragmatic arguments to the contrary). Under the myth of the cyborg, Buffy's actions would be forbidden, rendered Other by the valorization of the grotesque.[19] The second effect of this formulation of desire is to legitimate rape, an act which could be implied in or result from "the confusion of boundaries" and the characterization of cyborgs as "illegitimate" (Haraway 150-1). The original rape of the first Slayer by demon power in service of the men in charge, as a metaphor for the production of a cyborg, is not forbidden by Haraway's theory and makes a problematic sort of sense, both in that rape can be read as a metaphor of exploitation and domination under capitalism, and in that cyborgs are the desexualized avatars of change. Interestingly, rape is also an aspect of Bakhtin's carnival and the liberation from rules and norms. Needless to say, a theory which does not problematize the working of power in rape while seeming to legitimate rape is suspect.

The problem of power and exploitation echoes the problems associated with desire in general and rape in particular in the cyborg narrative. Adam (the cyborg created by the Initiative, a military organization) dramatizes these problems in Season 4. Adam, following Haraway's cyborg narrative, does repudiate those who made him and their claims to him, a perfect blasphemous cyborg. He goes on a killing spree and tries to take power by violently creating more cyborgs - a problematic resolution that is only indicted by Haraway's feminist-socialist politics and not her model of the cyborg. Here, we see that whatever kinship Adam feels for machines and animals (Haraway 154) in no way translates into respect for humans (and/or a refusal to engage in exploit or oppress them); instead he can only value them insofar as he violently transforms them into images of himself. Again, this implies that only grotesque bodies can be valued in the new myth of the cyborg. Indeed, the model of coalition (with other sorts of non-cyborg people) is much weaker in the cyborg model as the cyborg's own necessarily "perverse" desires of contamination and contradiction and this illusory "kinship" are the only "moral" poles that operate to guide the cyborg. We are not pushed to ask about the workings of history, beyond the history of the individual, as we are in the case of the Borderlands mapping. In the cyborg model, technology (magic) is the more powerful source that must be rebelled against or used perversely, a formulation which avoids questions about power and the multiplicity of oppression.[20] When the cyborg is a moral being, such as Buffy, these questions are not provoked, for Buffy fits the expectations of feminist theory. When, however, a cyborg such as Adam makes other, what we might consider amoral choices, the cyborg theory provides no grounding for understanding the dynamics of power behind such a move. Adam is Buffy's shadow-image, deprived of community and incapable of forming one without violence.[21] The cyborg theory offers an ordering of power that Others non-cyborg bodies, a potentially dangerous move when combined with the lack of attention to the multiplicity of power relations.[22]

The refusal of the morbid maternal is most clearly evident in the question of death and rebirth/regeneration. Buffy is explicitly not a maternal figure on the verge of death, rather in her perpetually adolescent girl's body, Buffy is nearly anti-maternal. Instead of being reborn or birthing others, Buffy is regenerated in the manner of a cyborg and reproduces in the manner of the Mestiza/Queer. Buffy actually dies twice and is brought back to life both times by her friends. The first time she is killed is in the Season 1 Finale, "Prophecy Girl" (1012.) Buffy goes to confront the Master (an incredibly old and powerful Vampire) and is killed by him - humiliated and drowned. Xander and Angel follow her into the Master's caves, too late to stop her death, and Xander breathes life back into her body. She is regenerated, more powerful than she was before, without fear. She confronts the Master again, and destroys him. Read metaphorically, this symbolizes the importance of community and the support of friends, and represents a regeneration of the self through friendship. The second time Buffy dies, she sacrifices herself to save the world and her sister, Dawn, a noble world-saving sacrifice of the kind usually denied women. She is brought back to life months after her death in a ceremony led by her Wiccan best-friend, Willow, but returns to her regenerated body confused and unhappy. Though Buffy's friends thought she was in Hell, she later explains she was in Heaven. She is made less, rather than more by her unwilling regeneration: she had achieved peace, but was brought back by her friends into earthly conflict. Rather than going "down" to the degraded realm, Buffy was regenerated after she went "up" to the realm of perfection, and thus she could not easily reenter the imperfection of life. This serves as an example of the necessity of "degradation [which] digs a bodily grave for a new birth; it has not only a destructive negative aspect, but also a regenerating one" (Bakhtin 21). Athough Buffy can step out of the reproductive matrix and be regenerated after a humiliating, degrading death in a watery grave to no ill effects, regeneration after a noble sacrifice and journey to heaven is damaging.

Buffy also reproduces in a "queer" way via her "sister" Dawn. Dawn used to be a ball of energy, called the "key," but was turned into a human being by monks trying to save the world (Season Five). Using Buffy's blood, Dawn was created as a genetic replica of Buffy and became her sister, inserted into Buffy's life through magic. After Buffy's mom's death, Buffy becomes her sister's caregiver, the maternal figure in her life. The maternal is recuperated, but only by denying the fleshy elements of birth and thus, death. This is not a cyborg regeneration, but a mode of reproduction more like that of the Queer - reproduction through affinity. Though the monks make the key into Dawn, Dawn chooses to stay with Buffy and be in her family, which can be read as a metaphor of fate, queerness, and the formation of "family" or a supportive, nurturing, queer community. Neither cyborg or the morbid maternal, this example embodies Anzaldua's concept of a queer/mestiza nonsexually reproductive community: "As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman's sister or potential lover" (Anzaldua 102).

In the resonance and differences between these three theories, BtVS provides glimpses of how the carnival might work in the postmodern and how feminism might take up the carnival. BtVS exemplifies one of the main differences between the carnival and the Borderlands/Cyborg space, in that the latter two require the formation of community, a contradictory whole, with its own standards and a recognized political agenda, while the former claims to include everyone involuntarily without a political agenda, but which accomplishes the grotesque through the expulsion of "woman" from the rational. BtVS also recuperates the place of laughter - not just irony - in destroying and remaking both main characters and monsters, creating a world that is driven by politics (the injunction to fight evil), but also becomes extrapolitical in those fleeting moments when fear is destroyed and complete liberty reigns. Buffy puns and we know that she will pun again, that the cycle of laughter, killing monsters, and the birth of new monsters will continue. Even in the Borderlands of Buffy's community, the carnival is fleeting. For while Haraway and Anzaldua imagine the grotesque as the union of contradictory wholes, differentially valued in society, Bakhtin imagines the grotesque as the exaggeration of that which is already outside society and which all step into, into a space of ever-renewed order. The carnival is of necessity instable, impossible to hold on to, but the Borderlands and the space of cyborg politics can be lived. BtVS balances these contradictory forces in its own parodic and self-contradictory way, demonstrating what Haraway calls "[i]rony [which] is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically….[and] tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true"(149). BtVS portrays the rupture and troubling of boundaries through the central figure of the grotesque body (advocated by all three theories), which embodies this disruption and invites others - perhaps even the audience - into similar, liberating disruptions. Though BtVS does not pull the audience into bodily participation, as Bakhtin advocates, it follows Anzaldua's call to portray "images, words, stories [which] have this transformative power, [because they] arise from the human body - flesh and bone - and from the Earth's body - stone, sky, liquid, soil" (Anzaldua 97). The stories of BtVS are indeed rooted in the flesh and in the elements. Finally, BtVS portrays degradation and nonsexual reproduction, death and nonsexual rebirth, in a way that combines Bakhtin's theory of the carnival and cyborg politics/Borderlands, embodying new modes of regeneration and pointing to a way that these theories can come together in offering new visions of transformation that challenge conventional notions of gender, sexuality, and race. Ironically, the carnival itself is an insufficient utopia, as are the political strategies of the Borderlands or cyborg politics. However, in the play of contradictions between these theories, Buufy the Vampire Slayer provides a new way to see - and make sense of - the world, sporadically, ironically, offering a politically-engaged utopian vision.