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When Susan Faludi published her fiery polemic, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991), she noted the rise of "tough-guy films" and the marginalization or banishment of women from the screen and pointed out that many male film heroes of the 1980s headed off to "all-male war zones or the Wild West" (138). Three years later, in 1994, James William Gibson, in his engaged study, Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America, made the same point, reinforcing Faludi's observation that a "new war culture" was developing that idealized the violent and misogynous male warrior and that ignored or denigrated women or presented them in conventionally feminine roles. This assumption of a male-dominant binary representation of gender in popular culture has not gone unchallenged, however, as Sherrie Inness demonstrates in her recently published study, Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Inness argues compellingly that physically and mentally strong women heroes have populated films, television series, and comic books since the 1960s and 1970s.
In the last several years, the rise of the indomitable tough woman has become an especially pronounced feature of television "episodics." The age of the tough-gal action show seems at hand, and women warriors such as Xena, the Warrior Princess, La Femme Nikita, and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer have become wildly popular, especially among young North Americans. These glamorous larger-than-life yet also disarmingly recognizable women battle evil on a daily basis and, without much fanfare, repeatedly save the world from untold horror. "Western storytelling," a writer for Psychology Today portentously insists, "hasn't seen their ilk since the legendary female fighters of the Celts" (Ventura, 62; as well, Kingwell, 77-78).
The shifting nature of gender representation in popular culture which Xena, Nikita, and Buffy seem to portend invites critical study. In this essay, I take up this theme through the lens of one woman warrior episodic, the critically acclaimed Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. As a feminist scholar, I appreciate the power of stories that bring women out of the shadows to center stage and permit protagonists to be disruptive and to challenge patriarchal values and institutions in society. As a women's historian, I comprehend that part of the struggle of maintaining an active voice for women in history concerns...