Joss Whedon and Race

Mary Ellen Iatropoulos is an independent scholar whose research and publications center on the intersections of literature, media, and culture, with special focus on Whedon. She works as director of education at Spark Media Project, a nonprofit focusing on media literacy and production, in Poughkeepsie, New York. Lowery A. Woodall III is an assistant professor of communication and theatre at Millersville University in Millersville, Pennsylvania, and is the faculty advisor for WIXQ-FM, Millersville’s campus radio station. He has written extensively on representations of otherness in popular culture through mass media texts.

• Table of ContentsPreface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction. The Individual, the Institutional and the Unintentional: Exploring the Whedonverses Through Critical Race TheoryMary Ellen Iatropoulos and Lowery A. WoodallPart I. The Caucasian Persuasion Here in the ’Dale: Race and Ethnicity in Buffy the Vampire Slayer“The black chick always gets it first”: Black Slayers in Sunnydale(Lynne Edwards)“I have no speech, no name”: The Denial of Female Agency Through Speech in Buffy the Vampire Slayer(Rachel McMurray)A Dodgy English Accent: The Rituals of a Contested Space of Englishness in “Helpless”(Joel Hawkes)She’s White and They Are History: Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Racialization of the Past and Present(Nelly Strehlau)“Let it simmer”: Tonal Shifts in “Pangs”(Rhonda V. Wilcox)Part II. From Buffy to Angel: Racial Representation Across Sunnydale and L.A. Representations of the Roma in Buffy and Angel(Katia McClain)An Inevitable Tragedy: The Troubled Life of Charles Gunn as an Allegory for General Strain Theory(Rejena Saulsberry)Part III. Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse: Race and Ethnicity at the Margins of the ’Verses Race, Space and the (De)Construction of Neocolonial 9 Difference in Firefly/Serenity(Brent M. ­Smith-Casanueva)Mexicans in Space? Joss Whedon’s Firefly, Reavers and the Man They Call Jayne(Daoine S. Bachran)Zoe Washburne: Navigating the ’Verse as a Military Woman of Color(Mayan Jarnagin)Programming Slavery: Race, Technology and the Quest for Freedom in Dollhouse(Brandeise ­Monk-Payton)“Memory itself guarantees nothing”: Dollhouse, Witnessing and “the jews”(Samira Nadkarni)Part IV. It’s a Play on Perspective: Long Views and Deep Focus on Race in the WhedonversesOn Soldiers and Sages: Problematizing the Roles of Black Men in the Whedonverses(Candra K. Gill)The Godmothers of Them All: ­Female-Centered Blaxploitation Films and the Heroines of Joss Whedon(Masani McGee)Someone’s Asian in Dr. Horrible: Humor, Reflexivity and the Absolution of Whiteness(Hélène ­Frohard-Dourlent)About the ContributorsCombined BibliographyIndex