Is Joss Whedon feminist enough?
Hopefully-provocative title aside, my GF puts a question in response to the heartbreaking Angel episode 'A Hole in the World': Does Joss Whedon kill his major male characters anywhere near as often as he offs his central females? The answer is obviously NO, he doesn't. So the real question is: why not? From which we get to a whole host of other more specific questions, but let's approach through that one. Why not?
[Note: This is just about as close as this blog comes to full-on lit-crit. It also assumes familiarity with Joss Whedon's work, though I hope to surprise even fans dropping some references to his writing beyond Buffy. Still, this is more highfalutin' than is traditional around these parts. Forewarned is forearmed.]
[Note 2: New readers (if there are any), find some other writing on Joss/Buffy/etc. here, here, here, here (a long post about fandom and subjective combat(!)), here (on the different ways The Sopranos and Buffy treat dreams), and here (spoilery for Angel's final story arc, so my housemates, don't read!).]
[Note 3: Whedonesque types, to clarify, while I may have buried the lede here, the implied answer to this deliberately silly, improperly framed titular question is 'Yes, but Angel is problematic.' Welcome again - please leave a comment if you'd like.]
The first and least satisfying answer is nothing more than: 'Numbers.' Most of the main characters on Buffy are women, and they're often in combat and conflict, so it makes sense that they'd be killed off (cf. Buffy, Anya, Kendra, Jenny Calendar, etc.). Angel was never positioned as that kind of explicitly feminist statement, and its recovery-from-checkered-and-brutal-past themes (Angel is a private detective with a drinking problem, remember) are much harder to rework in primarily-female stories, so its cast is largely male; as Fred puts it in 'A Hole in the World,' she 'walks with heroes,' '[her] boys,' even if Whedon regularly undercuts standard masculine/feminine expectations - as when Gunn is caught singing 'Three Little Maids' and tries to cover by turning it into a rap, but can't remember any rap lyrics. Firefly centered on Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his role on the outskirsts of (traditionally male-dominated) society, but as Whedon has pointed out, he can't help turning it into a show about a 'teen girl with superpowers,' namely River Tam. Whedon's inversions of standard sex-role formulae - the whore is the most powerful public figure on the ship, the formidable second-in-command on the ship is a married woman whose husband feels a combination of inferiority complex, willful submissiveness, and fear of cuckoldry, while the greasy ship's mechanic is a cute little girl - work as statements about culture on that show, and complicate the group dynamic. But when the time comes to start killing regulars on Firefly (or rather, in its film sequel, Serenity), he offs the husband and the priest. Whoever's more numerous does the dying on Firefly and Buffy.
But again, there's Angel, on which the following women die suffering horribly (we haven't watched up to the finale yet, and I won't talk about it though it plays into this argument): Fred, Cordelia, Darla, Lilah. The little girl in the White Room is brutally killed (though admittedly she's only a physical manifestation of all-powerful evil), and the particular way in which both Cordy, Fred, and Darla die is uniquely female: they die (or are rendered comatose) in childbirth.* Angel is a show largely about men in which the genre formulae seem to dictate that women bite the dust. And if you've just seen Angel's fourth season, in which a goddess bursts forth from Cordy to terrorize the world, you can be forgiven for raising an eyebrow when, a year later, a goddess bursts forth from Fred to (etc.).
But I credit Whedon with almost superhuman craftsmanship and commitment to egalitarian principles; if he's killing girls off left and right in his stories I imagine his reasons aren't the usual ones. He's got his fetishes like everyone else - notice how often shirtless males are made to endure torture on all three of his shows, particularly in the third season of Buffy, with Angel in the role of victim/convalescent much of the time, down to the finale - but I think the mortality rates on his shows tend to reflect the unique and progressive reordering of power that is a major theme in all his work. Think too of Alien: Resurrection, a middling film at the center of which are a mother-clone and daughter-robot, along with a dumb ox of a guy for ineffectual company. And of the sacrifice of the buddy-cop in Speed. And of the percentage of Angel and Buffy's adventures in which females end up aggressors (from praying mantis teacher lady to the demon of the Doublemeat to Glory to Illyria to the Amazons in 'She' to Willow's S6 rampage to the astonishing richness of Faith, Buffy's alter-ego, and on to the Primitive, the central figure in Buffy's evocative mythology). Among Whedon's work, Angel trades in the most problematic (from a feminist-evaluative standpoint) gender relations of all his shows, but it follows the general lines of his work, which is pointedly and consistently progressive.
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