Tracing the Carnival Spirit in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Feminist Reworkings of the Grotesque

Abstract

Taking Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS)as a platform of analysis, Sherman traces the connections and contradictions between the "grotesque bodies" in Bakhtin, Anzaldua, and Haraway. Arguing that a reconfigured carnival spirit finds its way into BtVS, Sherman explores the ways in which BtVS offers both sporadic visions of cosmic unity and liberation, as well as a committed political vision of coalition in service of justice. Foregrounding the political meaning of the grotesque and contradictory body, Sherman highlights the opposition between the temporary liberation of Bakhtin's carnival as defined by the always already outside society body of the morbid maternal, and the space of politics centrally defined by the Mestiza/Queer or cyborg. Sherman interrogates monstrous modes of reproduction and their theoretical offspring, exploring how society is imagined in each theory by such reproduction.