This is the Sunday Edition of Paging Dr. Lesbian. If you like this type of thing, subscribe, and share it with your friends. Upgrade your subscription for more, including weekly dispatches from the lesbian internet, monthly playlists, and a free sticker.

For the next month – until August 7 – I will be donating all proceeds from new paid subscriptions to Operation Olive Branch, a database that collects fundraisers for families seeking aid in Gaza. If you don’t want to subscribe, you can donate on your own.

Does it make sense to ask if a television show or a film is feminist or not? Popular media discourse often hinges on whether a particular text is good or bad in terms of what it represents or says about the world, especially when identity is involved. The answer to this question depends on how you define feminism – which frameworks you are using. (A similar question might be asked about queerness, eg. “is this text productively or positively queer?”) The problem with asking such a broad question or debating these topics is that there are so many different ideas about feminism, and pieces of media rarely land within one ideological camp, not to mention squarely on the side of good or bad. 

I’m always looking for interesting and smart analyses of pop culture, and one that has always stuck with me is an academic piece I read several years ago about the beloved TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Elana Levine’s essay “Buffy and the “New Girl Order”: Defining Feminism and Femininity,” a chapter in the book Undead TV: Essays on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, explores how the series aligns with several contemporary feminist frameworks.

Specifically, Levine discusses how the show upholds the ideals of postfeminism and third-wave feminism throughout its run. Levine quotes Judith Stacey, who writes that postfeminism describes “the simultaneous incorporation, revision, and depoliticization of many of the central goals of second wave [or 1970s] feminism.” Essentially, the framework suggests that the goals of second-wave feminism have already been achieved, and thus women are now responsible for making their own choices. Third-wave feminism, on the other hand, departs from second-wave feminism in that it emphasizes the contradictions and ambiguities of womanhood and centers on coalitional politics. 

Levine discusses Buffy’s endorsement and/or refutation of feminist ideologies by looking at three themes highlighted in the show. The first is multiplicity. Levine argues that Buffy takes up third-wave feminism’s focus on contradiction and ambiguity because Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is often juggling multiple identities (slayer and teenage girl, for example) and struggles to find her place because of this. At the same time, Levine suggests that this powerful message is undermined by the fact that Buffy is white, straight, and middle class, and the show rarely explores the lives of characters of color. Because of this, Buffy’s struggles can be viewed within the postfeminist framework of individual choice, rather than systemic oppressions.

In the next section, about feminine and feminist style, Levine discusses the third-wave feminist ethos about fashion. Levine quotes Melissa Klein’s Third Wave Agenda, in which she writes: “We are interested in creating not models of androgeny so much as models of contradiction. We want not to get rid of the trappings of traditional femininity or sexuality so much as to pair them with demonstrations of strength or power.” At the same time, this renewed emphasis on femininity can also align with the tenets of postfeminism, both of which refute the 1970s image of a hairy, consciously unattractive feminist. Buffy embodies the third wave’s emphasis on contradictory strength, and this is a core aspect of the show’s supposed feminist message. 

In the final section of the essay, Levine discusses the show’s turn toward feminist activism, the portion of the series that most explicitly aligns itself with the ideology of the third wave. In Buffy’s much-discussed series finale, the title character, with the help of her lesbian BFF Willow (Alyson Hannigan), decides to share her slayer power with all other potential slayers in order to defeat the final Big Bad. In a moving montage, we see potential slayers (all young women) across the world step into their slayer power as Willow casts her reality-altering spell. 

Though Buffy spends much of the final season acting as a lone wolf, this final pivot toward collective activism ultimately – though not comprehensively – defines the show’s ethos in alignment with third-wave feminism. As Levine writes, “Buffy ends the series as a truly new New Woman, one who redefines television’s version of feminism and rejects a post-feminist perspective that sees the need for collective action as a thing of the past.” Nonetheless, the series as a whole doesn’t abide by or uphold a single vision of feminism, moving from postfeminism to third-wave feminism depending on the episode. What this illustrates is not only that it is difficult to place a media text squarely on a sort of feminist “scale,” but also that defining the axes of that scale is a complex project. 

Another way to think about feminism and representation is to consider structures of power. In her 1998 article “Rethinking Power,” Amy Allen proposes three frameworks of power that help articulate women’s place within oppressive systems. Put simply, power-over describes the domination of others, or as Allen writes, someone’s ability to “constrain the choices” of others. Power-to is similar to empowerment, and describes one’s ability to achieve individual success. Power-with describes a group’s collective ability to achieve its goals – this can look like resistance or solidarity depending on the circumstances. 

Allen’s frameworks have been taken up by other feminist scholars over the years. In a journal article from 2016, Jean-Anne Sutherland and Kathryn M. Feltey conduct an analysis of so-called feminist films based on these three frameworks. They found that the majority of the films studied fell into the power-to category, ie. “women finding the courage to individually confront and challenge existing norms.” These films primarily centered on white, middle-class women, while black women were most likely to be found in power-over films, such as those in the blacksploitation genre. Films that fit within the power-with category were rare; the ones they identified include Nine to Five, Daughters of Dust, and North Country.

I’ve used Allen’s theory in my own work, looking at how superhero movies utilize ideas about empowerment and feminism in their narratives. In grad school, I wrote a paper analyzing Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel based on these frameworks.¹ I used these frameworks in conjunction with three other feminist theories: postfeminism (which aligns most with power-over), popular feminism (which aligns most with power-to), and third-wave feminism (which aligns most with power-with). Popular feminism, as defined by Sarah Benet-Weiser, centers around the relationship between injury and capacity. In essence, the concept sees feminism as the act of overcoming a crisis of confidence in order to achieve success within patriarchal systems. In both films, the type of power wielded by our inspiring protagonists changes over the course of the story. 

In Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) wields power-over in the first act, when she’s a soldier on Hala with no memory of her past. In the second act, she wields power-to, fighting back against the people who brainwashed her and coming into her identity as a hero. In the final act, she approaches power-with, aligning herself with the alien refugees she previously fought against. She’s never fully able to embody this type of collective power, however, because her super-powered state makes her distinct from all those around her. Though the film attempts to point towards collective action, its ethos most closely aligns with popular feminism, ie. individual empowerment.²

In Wonder Woman, the narrative doesn’t follow a typical empowerment journey. Diana (Gal Gadot) begins the film already empowered, having been raised on an island of fierce warrior women. The community depicted in this first act embodies power-with, harkening back to the third-wave ethos of the collective. When Diana enters the “world of men,” as her mother calls it, she leaves this Amazonian ideology behind and loses some of her empowered status. In the third act, she wields power-over, fighting Ares (David Thewlis) on her own. Much like Carol, Diana fights on behalf of humanity, rather than with them. The film moves from a third-wave feminist framework to a post-feminist one, indicating once more that feminist film analysis is far from cut and dry. 

Ultimately, it’s difficult to decide if a piece of media is feminist or not, and perhaps this isn’t a useful question to ask in the first place. A similar problem has arisen within discussions of the male gaze, a theory that has become watered down since entering the pop culture lexicon, and the Bechdel test, which was never meant to be a serious analytical framework at all. Conversations about representation remain at the forefront of popular discourse, and the aforementioned analyses exemplify strategies for deepening our understanding of pop culture on an ideological level. Not just what does a text say, but what does it do, and how does it engage with the ideas that define our ever-complicated world? Such questions are certainly tricky, but rich with possibility.