From Butler to Buffy: notes towards a strategy for identity analysis in contemporary television narrative

Abstract

Judith Butler’s theories of performative subjectivity provide a powerful set of understandings of the ways in which identities and selfhood are constituted in discourse and articulated in order to present selfhood as coherent, intelligible and recognizable. While increasingly influential in contemporary cultural studies, little attempt has been made to utilize the understanding of identities as performative in the analysis of contemporary entertainment media. The following article undertakes to develop a schema by which to analyse character development, change and transformation in contemporary television series. Focusing on Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a representative series which locates questions of identity across long multi-episode narrative arcs, the aim is two-fold: to read Buffy through Butler, and to draw Butler’s theories closer to media studies’ understandings of television programming, genre and narrative.