So, I had this very elaborate introduction about what impact Twilight has made, but after
the Twilight bashing in the opening session of this conference, I think everyone is aware
of that.
I don't need to go into that.
Let me just quickly remark that the vampire hype that it has sparked has now gone into
even the most unlikely area, so that, for instance, now the Deutsche Spar Kasser is advertising
its old age provisions, with a story, a TV spot of vampire love.
It's called Unsterplich Philipp, and every time I withdraw money from my account, there's
a poster that they then have on the display with the vampire.
So the Twilight phenomenon has undoubtedly left its mark, economically as well as culturally.
Today I want to talk about how it has apparently shifted the representation of gender roles
in teen vampire fiction.
Now while browsing the web a couple of months ago, I came across an interesting YouTube
video entitled Buffy vs. Edward, Twilight Remix.
Video remix artist Jonathan McIntosh here has mixed scenes from Buffy and the first
Twilight movie in order to retell the story of the latter with Buffy in its protagonist's
place.
In the six-minute mash-up clip, so because it's six minutes I can't show it here but
it's on YouTube so I advise you to have a look at it, it's pretty funny, in the six-minute
mash-up clip Buffy meets teen vampire Edward Colnider high school, rejects his romantic
slash creepy approaches, finds out he is a vampire and then eventually stakes him.
McIntosh had the declared intention of sparking a discussion about the representation of gender
in Buffy and in Twilight in comparison.
He explains quote, more than just a showdown between the Slayer and the sparkly vampire,
it's also a humorous visualization of the metaphorical battle between two opposing visions
of gender roles in the 21st century, end of quote.
He succeeded in achieving the discussion he aimed for.
Apart from the many clicks and comments on YouTube, the clip was also commented upon
by numerous newspapers and magazines.
The general consensus in these comments seems to be that while Buffy was a progressive feminist
icon battling patriarchy, Twilight's battle ten years later is the opposite, a pre-emancipatory
damsel in distress.
While it usually takes some time till academic discourse takes up on popular culture trends,
Twilight has already been heavily commented upon by critic of feminist voices.
In the athlete semi-academic anthology Twilight and Philosophy, for instance, feminist scholars
show themselves alarmed by the gender roles promoted by Twilight.
In accordance with McIntosh's clips, they point out that the behavior of the romantic
hero Edward resembles that of a stalker and abuser, and you'll find this argumentation
with Hassel, and that Bella Swan represents an archaic ideal of femininity, and that's
in the articles of Mann and Zach.
Quote, Bella seems to be committed to the woman who we might associate with the 1950s,
end of quote, states Bonniemann, for instance.
Kristen Stevens goes even further and dates her back to quote, the 19th century Gothic
hearings of sensibility, end of quote, in a paper published in Schlage.
Consequently, most commentators come to the conclusion that the popularity of Twilight
can only be understood as a step backwards for the feminist agenda.
Questioning this conclusion will be the objective of my talk today.
So is Twilight symptomatic of backlash concerning feminism in the new millennium?
Like McIntosh, I will elucidate what it is in particular about Twilight that has provoked
these comments through a comparison with teen vampire fiction in the preceding decade, the
90s.
Because of the format of my presentation today, I can only do so very sketchily.
To those interested in a more detailed comparison of Twilight and Buffy, I would recommend Kristen
Stevens' paper in Schlage that I just referred to.
In a second step, I will look at how fans judge the representation of gender roles,
and particularly femininity in Twilight.
I will argue that there is evidence that many female readers and viewers are very much aware
that Bella is not a good role model, but enjoy the novels nonetheless.
Doing this, I will be focusing on German Twilight fans specifically.
None of them seem to read the novels in what Stuart Hall calls the negotiated code.
Furthermore, I will briefly explore one possible explanation as to why even readers with a
strong feminist awareness are drawn to the novel series.
What I intend to show to you today is that in a comparison of the cultural impact of
Buffy and Twilight, one must take heed of several differences between the two, namely
differences in narrative structure, function, and theme, and therefore also differences
in their cultural function.
Though vampires have been with us for quite a while, teen vampires are a rather young
creation.
Their hour of birth is to be located in the late 80s, which were the golden era of teen
movies, and more exactly in the 1987, which saw the release of actually two teen vampire
movies, The Lost Boys in Near Dark, which you might have seen.
Both of them are voice coming of age stories, and in both, vampirism is used as a metaphor
for the troubles of growing up.
This trope continues to be the key ingredient of teen vampire fiction in the 90s.
The TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which aired from 1997 to 2003, depicts all that
is troubling teenagers through the metaphor of demons and vampires and their influence
on the young, such are Goose Wilcox, for example.
Or by this time, the story explicitly is a girl's story, a significant shift as from
then on vampire fiction increasingly addressed its female audience.
Now while on the one hand continuing the sub-genre central metaphor, the main idea behind the
show's concept on the other hand was the subversive one.
The series creator, Joss Whedon, has often been quoted declaring that with Buffy, he
was setting out to deconstruct the stereotype of the helpless little brown girl that gets
killed in every horror movie.
He took this typical helpless victim and turned her into his protagonist, a powerful herring,
a girl with a calling to slay vampires and all other kinds of demons.
On the one hand, her looks that correspond to the hegemonic American beauty ideal and
her preoccupation with her own image that results in excessive consumerism make her
an accomplice of patriarchal structures that keep women down.
And this screenshot, by the way, is from the first episode where I think she looks especially
Britney Spears-like.
On the other hand, her self-assertive manner, her disregard of patriarchal authorities and
her extraordinary strengths make her an empowered young woman.
Combining these conflicting attitudes, she is a typical representative of the commercialized
version of the 90s girl power movement.
While the term girl power started out in the subculture of feminist punk, it entered mainstream
culture in a commercialized and, according to its originators, distorted version through
the pop band Spice Girls.
By being a product of the male-dominated pop industry, the Spice Girls claim for themselves
to be promoters of female empowerment.
Like Buffy, this meant a combination of looks that corresponded to her hegemonic ideas of
femininity, encouraging objectification and female consumerism with a self-assertive,
at times even cocky manner.
Because of this paradoxical combination, the commercial version of girl power as represented
by Spice Girls, for instance, and Buffy, has often been criticized as politically ineffective
or even counterproductive.
Though the most popular one, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is certainly not the only example for
how the idea of girl power affected teen vampire fiction in the late 90s.
In the same decade, A.J. Smith wrote the two series The Vampire Diaries, which has only
recently been adapted as a TV show, and The Night World.
The second volume of Night World, Daughters of Darkness, tells the story of a teenage
girl who falls in love with an incredibly good-looking vampire, though he behaves like
an obnoxious idiot towards her.
Their love is a match made by destiny, yet who's standing in the way is the girl's best
friend, a boy from the lower classes, who turns out to be a werewolf.
To those of you familiar with Twilight's plot, this might ring a bell.
Maya's character constellation is very similar to Smith's, and her conception of predestined
lovers is just as kitschy.
Yet it is remarkable what Smith does with these prerequisites.
While Twilight's happy and info-beller consists of marriage and motherhood, Smith's protagonist
is tearing towards different objectives.
Now, this is from the end of the novel.
Quote,
He started down the wheat-strewn path to the road.
He is the vampire boy.
For a moment in the deep violet twilight, he did look to Mary Lynette like a knight walking
off on a quest, and then comes a terribly kitschy bid about how the sky would always
be there for the both of them and how that was compared to them.
But now it gets good, and she was clear on who she was at last.
She was Mary Lynette, and someday she'd discover a supernova or a comet or a black hole.
But she'd do it as a human, and Ash would come back next year.
Smith is showing us a character for whom the happy and kitschy and romantic as it may be
does not mainly consist of finding her other half, but finding herself.
In Smith's fiction, girls are allowed to have interests of their own, in this case astronomy,
and to pursue them, although destiny has picked them to be the partner of a vampire.
Romantic sometimes, star-crossed love plays a big part in team vampire fiction of the
90s, but it is not the only purpose in life for the female protagonists.
Coming back to Buffy, the vampire slave, this means that though the relationship between
Buffy and her vampire lover Angel is one of the pillars of the show's plot, Buffy
is mainly busy fulfilling her calling as the Slayer.
Occasionally, she's actually not only thinking about her clothes and hair, but also about
how her destiny will affect her career paths, that is, will she ever graduate, what profession
can she work in, and so on.
At the same time, she has to juggle her often problematic family life, and last but not
least.
In the circle of her loyal friends, that is probably the most defining element of her
life and character.
In Twilight, on the other hand, heterosexual love is the only purpose in and content of
life for the female protagonist.
At what Colin almost immediately becomes the center of Belle's life, she readily and eagerly
accepts becoming a relative being, August Bonneman, who then quotes directly from the
novels to demonstrate that.
So she says, once Edward leaves her alone, Bella describes herself as, and now comes
a quote directly from Maya, like a lost moon, my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic disaster
movie scenario of desolation that continued to circle in a tight little orbit around the
empty space left behind, end of quote.
In contrast to Buffy or Mary Lynette, Melma, yes, Bella, is an almost featureless character.
She has no abilities and no interest of her own, no hobbies, no aims in life but to be
with Edward.
She has to be forced to even as much as consider going to university when she has graduated
from high school.
In some then, she really seems an uninteresting character for any female reader, and yet the
Twilight books and movies enjoy an immense popularity with a predominantly female audience.
Now does this mean that feminism has run into a dead end at the beginning of the new millennium?
In answer to this question, let me first point out that being a fan of Twilight does not
necessarily mean buying into its gender politics.
As Stuart Hall pointed out, there are different modes of dealing with the text.
You can read it in the hegemonic dominant code, the oppositional code, or the negotiated
code.
The letter basically means that you agree with some ideological messages of the text,
but you disagree to others.
Let me also point out that most German Twilight fan forums feature a threat where readers
discuss the character Bella Swan and whether they like her or not.
Although all contributors in these forums are devoted Twilight fans, many of them point
out that Bella is too submissive and too forgiving towards Edward, that she is way
too easy to manipulate and to patronize, or that she is simply plain boring.
In a feature on the Twilight phenomenon produced by the Zeté F. Formant aspector, Twilight
fans are interviewed on the novels and their fascination with them.
While the young women swoon over Edward and the romantic story, they are not uncritical
towards the old-fashioned ideas and conventions concerning relationships that are propagated
in the story.
Now, I've got a short clip and I know you won't be able to hear it, or at least most
of you, but I need to hear it one more time so I can tell you what they say in it afterwards
correctly.
Okay, so I don't know whether you call all of that.
So as the commentator suggested, it is indeed possible to enjoy the story all the while
ignoring parts of its message.
Marrying someone at the early age of 18 to become his codependent wife and mother of
his children does not seem to be this specific fan's dream of her life.
And by the way, she's also too old for that.
She's already 20, so the moment was there and is gone.
I think she's represented for a large part of the readership who indulges in the old-fashioned
romanticism of the story, yet has got quite different ideas of what their lives as young
women in the 21st century should look like.
In other words, they may, for instance, know what Sydney Lauper meant when she's saying
girls just want to have fun and may prefer that to making a lifelong commitment to a
man at the age of 18.
Now, with the words of Joss Whedon, where do we go from here?
Operating on this premise that a considerable part of the female readership enjoys the story,
yet does not agree to the preemancipatory image of femininity promoted by the text,
the question arises what exactly makes the story pleasurable or enticing to this part
of the readership.
I want to briefly sketch a thesis introduced by Maria Larsen that we assume we published
in an upcoming anthology about twilight, probably entitled Crossing Borders and Boundaries.
Larsen suggests, and I think she does so very convincingly, that the twilight movies
demonstrate a use of the female gaze, especially the first movie, and of an objectification
of the male body, especially the new moon movie.
She explains that twilight complicates Laura Mulvey's notion of the male voyeuristic gaze
onto the objectified female body.
I would extend her observation from the movies to the novels on which they are based.
The twilight books have often been criticized for their lack of action.
Instead, especially may twilight haters complain that they mainly consist of descriptions of
how Edward looks like.
This complaint is indeed a justified one.
All that is going on in the central scene of the first novel, the episode on the meadow,
for instance, is the act of looking.
Quote, Edward in the sunlight was shocking.
I couldn't get used to it, though I'd been staring at him all afternoon.
He lay perfectly still in the grass, shirt open over his sculpted incandescent chest,
his scintillating arms bare.
His glistening paler ventilates were shut, though of course he didn't sleep.
A perfect statue, carved in some unknown stone, smooth like marble, jittering like crystal.
I would have liked to lie back a seated and let the sun warm my face, but I stayed curled
up, my chin resting on my knees, unwilling to take my eyes off him.
The meadow, so spectacular to me at first, paled next to his magnificence.
Hesitantly, always afraid, even now, that he would disappear like a mirage, too beautiful
to be real, hesitantly, I reached out one finger and stoked the back of his shimmering
hand where it lay within my reach.
I marveled again at the perfect texture set in smooth, cool-ass stone.
I know you're a bit probably distracted by the whole glittering thing, because as always
we'll get people's attention first, but try to get away from that and focus on the things
that I've marked in color.
So in this short passage alone, we have four nouns and phrases describing Edward as a passive
object or even spectacle, and three verbs describing the action of looking.
However, the direction of this gaze is converged to its usual direction.
Generals have been reversed here, whereas it is women who are passive objects of the
mere gaze in the traditional understanding of general worlds.
We here have a scene where a young boy lies motionlessly with closed eyes, the perfect
example of a passive objectified body, to be looked at by a female viewer who appraises
his beauty.
Actually, if I may briefly interject that, although Edward has all these qualities that
are very fatherlike, that he's so protective and so powerful and all these things, the
thing that draws Bella's attention to him in the beginning is that he's so beautiful.
He's the prettiest boy at school.
That's why he's interesting.
I think this is rather unusual, because usually this is why girls are interesting to boys.
I think this is really a crucial point in the novel.
As this passage illustrates, Twilight is all about an objectification of the male body.
Hence, Bella does not have to be an interesting character.
Her readers do not identify with her the way they identified with Buffy, because while
Buffy was the agent and motor of the story, Bella is little more than the camera lens
through which the spectacle of the beautiful male body unfolds for the reader of Hero.
If you are familiar with Susan Boulders's The Male Body, you may see this as a continuation
of the Calvin Klein fashion ads of the 90s, which depicted men as passive objects of the
gaze in advertisement for the first time.
In a way then, Twilight actually is a continuation of the girl power concept of the 90s.
After all, what is more in line with female empowerment than appropriating a traditionally
male perspective onto the objectified body?
Twilight's appeal, starting already with the literary text itself, lies in the eroticizing
of a young male body as passive spectacle for a female audience and the marketing of
this spectacle.
From this perspective, Twilight is rather symptomatic of an advance concerning the equality
of genders when it comes to the issue of objectification, and this advance is certainly
not due to political activism, but to consumer culture, as Boulder already pointed out in
her analysis of the Calvin Klein ads.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, of course, remains to be discussed, but what
hopefully has become clear is that the representation of gender in Twilight is more complex than
one might first assume.
Evaluating the phenomenon with regard to its merits and drawbacks in relation to feminism
results in an outcome that is at least two-sided.
Thank you for your attention.