Emptying the future: Queer melodramatics and negative utopia in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Why should we still care about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003, WB/UPN)? With more than two hundred scholarly articles, a yearly conference and an academic journal devoted to its study, Buffy has been well explored. Yet compared to current broadcast programming, the show continues to stand out as an uncommonly radical mainstream text. Since Buffy’s last airing, realist images of the ‘good gay citizen’ have proliferated across US broadcast television, depicting lesbian and gay characters as assimilated extensions of the bourgeois heteronormative family and its consumer practices. In contrast, Buffy offers viewers a melodramatic and queerly negative popular aesthetic of the sort that barely exists today. In this article, therefore, the author returns to Buffy and its darkly queer hero, Willow Rosenberg (played by Alyson Hannigan), as indicators of utopian possibilities forgotten – but hopefully not yet lost.