“you can’t charge innocent people for saving their lives!” work in buffy the vampire slayer

‘‘You Can’t Charge Innocent Peoplefor Saving Their Lives!’’ Work in

Buffy the Vampire Slayer1

Matt Davies

Newcastle University

Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents an argument about and critique of workthat signals work’s transformation from an alienating burden imposedupon the worker into the prospect for autonomy and self-creationthrough the struggle to integrate creativity with sociability. This transfor-mation of work is realized through a transformation of space that, inturn, signals a connection between the critique of work and the critiqueof International Relations (IR). To begin to think of a possible worldpolitics that can overcome the limiting of politics in IR may indeedrequire the kind of critique of work that Buffy the Vampire Slayer devel-ops—a critique that much critical theory seems to have abandoned.Thus a critique of IR entails an analytical engagement with documentsthat can mediate between theoretical reflection and the lived dramas ofeveryday life, such as those mediations produced in popular culture.

One of the enduring habits bequeathed by International Relations (IR) to think-ing about world politics is the conceit that IR are constituted as separate fromthe level of the social and the everyday. This ‘‘spatial fix’’ in IR rests on geopolit-ical and scalar assumptions that situate international interactions beyond thescale of the nation or the state and attempt to contain political contention andthe possibility for emergent political subjects within, and with reference to, theterritorial state. When problems of everyday life appear in IR, therefore, it isalmost invariably in terms of problems defined by this spatial fix—thus if workor social reproduction show up as international problems, it will be in termsof migration, trade, or debt. This means that for IR, the meaning, practice, orexperience of work itself is invisible—not an issue for the field to consider.

This assertion—that the definition of the field of IR as a separate level pre-cludes considering problems associated with work because of its geopolitical andscalar assumptions—does not consider the contemporary traditions of critical IRtheorizing that set out to critique these assumptions and their consequences.However, although for different reasons, critical IR theory also gives very littleattention to work. In the subfield of International Political Economy, where suchattention might be expected, the pioneering work of Cox (1987) and Harrod(1987) elaborated an analytical system that linked world order with power asproduced and experienced in the relations of production; however, in the neo-Gramscian IR scholarship that followed, much more attention has been paid to

1Thanks to Beth Davies, Gigi Herbert, David Levine, Phoebe Moore, Michael Niemann, Simon Philpott,Christina Rowley, Joshua Shaw, Holly Welker, and two anonymous reviewers for their generous and thoughtfulcomments and criticisms.

� 2010 International Studies Association

International Political Sociology (2010) 4, 178–195

the constitution of world orders than to the power relations of production(Davies and Ryner 2006). Poststructuralist IR theories have radically destabilizedthe governing assumptions underlying the spatial fix but primarily in terms ofthe discursive or biopolitical regulation of subjects, showing little interest in work(an important exception is Wendy Larner, for example, Larner 2002; Larner andMolloy 2009). Some strands of feminist scholarship have provided acute examin-ations of the impact of work on subjectivity as a problem for IR: Anderson(2000), Salzinger (2003), and Elias (2005) are exemplary.

If IR tends to constitute its objects in ways that preclude problems that itsituates at a different ‘‘level,’’ then how can we think about world politics fromthe perspective of experience or practice—or, to put it bluntly, how can wethink about world politics politically? If IR theory cannot speak to the dramasof everyday life, how can reflections on work—a nearly universal humanexperience—illuminate world politics?

The problem of the invisibility of work is not confined to IR. Work has alsobeen set aside in much contemporary social and political theory. This was notalways the case. In Hegel and in Marx, notably, work was positively valued asinherent to the process of human self-creation and emancipation. However, insocial and political theory in the late twentieth century, the concept of work wasstripped of its critical and normative content. The study of Industrial Relations,inflected by positivist and behavioralist sociology, reduced work to the technicalprocedures organized by Taylorization (Harrod 1997). Critical theory after thelinguistic, communicative, or cultural turns identified work with instrumentalaction and critiqued the concept in terms of a metaphysics of labor (for exam-ple, Habermas 1987[1968] or Baudrillard 1975).

More recently, work has been partially reassessed in critical theory. Radicaltheorists in Italy influenced by Negri’s reflections on working class politicsdeveloped the notion of ‘‘immaterial labor’’ (Lazzaratto 1996; Hardt andNegri 2000), though analytically, this notion has referred more to the regulationof labor than to the meaning and experience of work itself. Burawoy (1985),Sennett (1998, 2008), and Ross (2004) have examined the consequences ofchanges in the labor regime for workers. Levine and Rizvi (2005) define povertyin terms of a lack of creative, meaningful work and argue that development pol-icy must address this lack and its consequences. However, these ideas have notbeen taken up in poverty discourse or development policy. Work has been recon-sidered within the theory of recognition through, for example, the writings ofHonneth (1995, 2007a,b) and of Dejours (2007). However, despite these impor-tant contributions, work remains at best marginal to much contemporary socialand political theory and, strikingly, in clearly relevant subfields to IR, such asInternational Political Economy and International Political Sociology.

If theory is blind to work, can a document of popular culture provide the cri-tique that can illuminate this practice? Unfortunately, work also remains opaqueto, if omnipresent in, popular culture. On television, most drama and most com-edies are situated in working lives: cop shows and police procedure dramas suchas The Bill or the various incarnations of CSI or hospital dramas like ER andCasualty are emblematic. But one reason that Buffy the Vampire Slayer2 wasexceptional is that it presented a particular and explicit argument about work,about the importance of the quality of work, and about the place work plays inthe processes of human development and self-realization. Without drifting into a

2Buffy the Vampire Slayer aired in the United States from 1997 to 2003, first on the WB network and later onUPN. It was rebroadcast in many other countries and all seven seasons were released on DVD. In the discussion thatfollows, I focus on these seven seasons and leave aside both the ‘‘Season 8’’ graphic novel and the spin-off series,Angel. I have attempted to discuss the argument about work presented through the development of the titlecharacter, Buffy Summers, in ways that do not depend on prior knowledge of the series, although I have providednecessary background on the narrative and the other characters in endnotes.

179Matt Davies

metaphysics of labor—that is, without reducing all of human activity and theprospects for social and political change to the labor process—Buffy the VampireSlayer argues that work entails creativity, work frames the prospects for the wayswe can be social beings, and the political struggles over the control of work arecentral to human development.

The creative practice3 of being a Slayer and how Buffy Summers works andexperiences work matter because any critical approach to world politics andinternational studies must account for the mediations—mediations such aswork—between different scales and levels of political relations and everyday lifeand for the ways in which the spaces of IR are produced. Indeed, the critique ofwork in Buffy the Vampire Slayer entails a critique of the ways that politics is con-tained, fixed in space, and removed from the scale or level of the global in IR.These considerations are also important because, as Buffy observes in ‘‘Lessons,’’the opening episode of Season 7, ‘‘it’s about power’’—although ‘‘power’’remains relatively undefined in the series (‘‘Lessons’’ 7.01).4 Here, I will explorepower in the production relations that organize Buffy the Vampire Slayer but with-out prejudice to other forms or practices of power that the program examines.Finally, the critique of work is important because for Buffy, it signals a possibilityfor political transformation through her own capacity to address contradictionsin her working life.

What Is Work?

Before spelling out the argument about work presented in Buffy the VampireSlayer, we need a conceptual definition of work. Common sense would definework in terms of individual effort oriented toward success through due compen-sation, and thus situate work as the economic element of everyday life, distinctfrom the time spent in the private realm of the family or in recreation or leisure.As such, the problems of work are understood as economic problems; for exam-ple, is the compensation for the time spent working appropriate? Is theexchange freely entered into? These are important questions, especially forpoorly paid workers or people whose work is compelled or uncompensated. Butthe configuration of work as the economic element of everyday life is an histori-cal artefact, produced by the commodification of labor power, and econom-ics—especially the economics of the market exchange—cannot speak to thequestions of what work is, what it means for the person working, and how dailylife might be constituted so that work is not as a burden requiring compensationbut a meaningful and fulfilling activity of self-creation.

Following Marx (and as articulated by Honneth 1995:16), we can examinework in three dimensions. First, work is the activity through which the humanspecies reproduces itself; second, it is the context for and the manner in whichpeople gain cognitive access to reality; and third, it is the means whereby work-ing subjects develop new capacities and needs that go beyond what the socialstructure itself permits or enables: that is, it is through work that self-develop-ment takes place.5

Regarding the first dimension of work, feminist economists have for decadesinsisted on the importance of social reproduction for capital accumulation (the

3In Marxism and Literature, Raymond Williams discusses creative practice in terms of how cultural subjects areengaged in specific practices of self-making, thus the concept has important methodological implications for theanalysis of how Buffy struggles with the ways work shapes her life (Williams 1977:212).

4This essay uses the American convention of referring to all seven televised ‘‘seasons’’ as the ‘‘series.’’ Episodesare cited by their name, followed by the number of the season and the number of the episode; thus ‘‘Lessons’’7.01 refers to the first episode of the seventh season. I made transcriptions of quotes cited herein from the DVDsof the series.

5For an extended discussion of these issues, see also Levine (2010).

180 You Can’t Charge Innocent People for Saving Their Lives!

literature on this topic is quite broad; the Wages for Housework campaign andthe debates it provoked helped to focus attention on the importance of repro-ductive work: see, for example, Dalla Costa and James 1975; and a more recentassessment in Federici 2004). Thanks to the efforts of feminist scholars, socialreproduction has recently become an important issue for International PoliticalEconomy (especially Anderson 2000; Young 2001; Elson 2002; Bakker and Gill2003). Social reproduction is not reducible to procreation. In addition to biolog-ical reproduction, it necessarily entails the work, including the work of caring,required for labor power and for the species itself to be reproduced, and thereproduction of the institutions and processes associated with the creation ofcommunities (Bakker and Gill 2003:17–18). It thus also entails more broadly thereproduction of the social relations of production themselves (Lefebvre 1976).Social reproduction is extensive in the sense that it occurs through the everydayperformance of the tasks of reproducing social relations; feminist research andtheory have demonstrated the relationships between the performance of thework surrounding social reproduction, its typically unpaid or poorly paid status,the precariousness and vulnerability of the workers in this part of the economy,and gender, especially the assigning of the tasks of reproduction to women andwomen’s socialization into these tasks. This matters for Buffy, as we will see,because these broad social relations take the task of fighting vampires anddemons—defending humanity—out of the market, leaving them unpaid, whiledetermining for Buffy, in relation to her social obligations and her destiny, thekinds of paid labor available to her as poorly paid reproductive labor.

The second dimension of work specified by Honneth is the activity throughwhich humans gain cognitive access to reality. This insight is developed mostforcefully by Christophe Dejours (2007). For Dejours, work involves both intelli-gence and the body in tasks that require feeling, thinking, invention, and creativ-ity in relation to the material and social world. The third dimension of workentails the creation and development of the self in and through social labor.Skills are gained not only in relation to the mastery of a given task, but also inthe development of the autonomy of the subject:

Suffering is also a point of departure, for the concentration of subjectivity thatit entails prefigures a subsequent period of expansion, redeployment, andre-expansion….in this movement that starts out from the reality of the worldas resistance to will or desire and culminates in intelligence and the power totransform the world, subjectivity itself is transformed, increased, and revealed to itself.(Dejours 2007:48)

Crucially, however, neither work as cognitive access to reality nor work as thedevelopment of the self is asocial. Both depend on recognition and the visibilityof work: the pathologies of the workplace that Dejours studies as a clinician havetheir roots in the organization of work in ways that isolate and fragment workersand deny the recognition of their creative capacities. Thus although the represen-tation of work is often highly individualistic, this representation depends on par-ticular historical configurations of work as mediated through marketexchanges—individual contracts into which people are free to enter or not, asthey choose. Work as a lived experience is at odds with this representation, forwork is always necessarily social and embedded in social relations.

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre examines the way that the idea ofwork becomes separate from production. For Lefebvre, ‘‘work’’ retains archaicconnotations of craft and creativity, as in the notion of a ‘‘work’’ of art, an œuvre.Production, on the contrary, takes on the connotations of an industrial process:one creates works but produces things. Production thus is associated withabstract labor: interchangeable units in a production process organized in

181Matt Davies

abstract space through the social and technical divisions of labor and throughmarkets. Work remains associated with small-scale artisanal production whereboth the product itself and its appropriation could be under the control of theartisan. Work, then, has been debased by the separation of work (œuvre) orcraft from production, and the structure of social labor under capital is animpediment to recasting work as meaningful and emancipatory for the worker(Lefebvre 1991b:69–75; see also Davies 2009).

Normatively, by this account, work appears to have more integrity, and to offera greater possibility for integrity and self-realization, than production does. Theintegration of the mental and the manual in work contrasts with their political,economic, technical, and social separation in production. One of the critical nor-mative challenges posed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer comes from Buffy’s strugglesover her work: for most of the series, she struggles against her calling as theSlayer, a role evidently rooted in the organic but archaic notion of work as craft,whereas she both craves and needs an ordinary, even banal, modern life.Buffy thus appears to reject the possibility for integrity in her work in favor of amundane existence ordered by production.

In a nutshell, then, what is the argument about work in Buffy the VampireSlayer? Buffy’s struggles to come to terms with her vocation as the Slayer providemost of the dramatic force to the series. These struggles, in particular the waythey position Buffy between her calling and her desires, resolve themselvesaround the question of Buffy’s need for meaningful work. Work is only meaning-ful—and defensible—when the creative moment in work is present to theworker, when the product is available for appropriation by the worker, and whenthe creativity in work provides the occasion for overcoming the conditionswhereby the self-creation of social subjects or intersubjectivities is blocked orsubordinated to external necessities. Across its seven seasons, Buffy the VampireSlayer may be read as an extended argument about what meaningful work is incapitalist modernity and how workers might make work meaningful.

The following section of the paper is exegetical: I will explain what Buffythe Vampire Slayer’s argument about work is and how the argument is devel-oped. I then examine the implications of Buffy’s critique of work for the cri-tique of IR. In the conclusion, I will return to an examination of the premisethat the critique of work has been muted in contemporary critical theory, situ-ate the critique of work with regard to the critique of IR, and consider theprospects for recovering these critiques through engagements with popularculture.

How Does Buffy Work?

What is slaying, and what is the justification for describing it as a craft? In thefirst instance, slaying is a calling, a vocation. Through the first two seasons, eachepisode begins with a short version of the Slayer mythology: ‘‘In every genera-tion, there is a Chosen One. She alone will stand against the vampires, thedemons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.’’ Buffy transforms thisrole—a point to which we will return below—but her calling is to destroy thesupernatural forces that would destroy human life. The First Slayer, who appearsin the dreams of Buffy and her friends Willow, Xander, and Giles,6 in the finalepisode of Season 4, ‘‘Restless,’’ presents herself to Buffy as the absolute versionof this role. In Buffy’s dream, the First Slayer explains what the Slayer is.

6Willow Rosenberg and Xander Harris are students who befriend Buffy when she starts school at SunnydaleHigh School in the first episode of Season 1. Rupert Giles is Buffy’s Watcher and works as the school librarian atthe beginning of the series. The ‘‘Scooby Gang,’’ made up of members of Buffy’s social network, supports Buffy asthe Slayer.


Buffy: Let her speak for herself. That’s what’s done in polite circles.

…Why do you follow me?

First Slayer (using Tara’s7 voice): I don’t.

Buffy: Where are my friends?

Tara’s voice: You’re asking the wrong questions.

Buffy: Make her speak.

Tara’s voice: I have no speech. No name. I live in the action of death, theblood cry, the penetrating wound. I am destruction. Absolute. Alone.

Buffy: The Slayer.

Tara’s voice: The first.

Buffy: I am not alone.

Tara’s voice: The Slayer does not walk in this world.

Buffy: I walk. I talk. I shop, I sneeze. I’m gonna be a fireman when the floodsroll back. There’s trees in the desert since you moved out. And I don’t sleep ona bed of bones. Now give me back my friends.

First Slayer (in her own voice): No… friends! Just the kill. We… are… alone!(‘‘Restless’’ 4.22)

We learn more about the origins of the Slayer in Season 7, when Buffy gainsaccess to the Shadow Men who sacrifice a girl by putting demon energy into herto turn her into a force capable of fighting vampires and demons. The ShadowMen also appear to be the origin of the Watchers’ Council, a bureaucratic insti-tution that trains and cultivates the Slayers.8 But what Buffy asserts here, in herdream confrontation with the First Slayer, is that she is and must be more than‘‘destruction. Absolute. Alone.’’ The Slayer is a girl, embodied, dwelling in theirreducible biology of the human body.

In ‘‘What’s My Line?’’ from Season 2, Buffy expresses how her calling seemslike a job to her—and the fact that she is the Chosen One, that is, called to dutyby higher powers, makes the work of slaying a burden to her. Kendra, a newlychosen Slayer9 who appears in Season 2, sees this splitting in Buffy and points tothe need to overcome her internal division:

Buffy: Well, maybe they won’t fire me for dating him (Angel10).

Kendra: You always do that.

7Tara becomes Willow’s girlfriend in Season 4, and through this relationship she becomes one of the Scoobies.8See Wall and Zryd (2002) for a discussion of the institution of the Watchers’ Council in relation to their effort

to control labor through controlling knowledge.9The presence of a second Slayer is a paradox that emerges after Buffy dies (and is brought back to life) at

the end of the Season 1. When Kendra is killed, Faith appears and returns to Sunnydale at various times. Theimportance of the presence of two Slayers for the narrative, in spite of the mythology of ‘‘one girl in all the world,’’will be discussed below.

10Angel is a vampire cursed with a soul, with whom Buffy falls in love in Season 1.

183Matt Davies

Buffy: Do what?

Kendra: You talk about slaying like it’s a job. It’s not. It’s who you are. (‘‘What’sMy Line? Part 2’’ 2.10)

But in another sense, Buffy is not wrong: slaying is a job and it is organizedlike one. The Watcher is responsible for how his Slayer behaves and the Watch-ers’ Council exercises guild-like authority over the Slayers. But if slaying is a job,it is a particular kind of work, one that depends on the development not only ofthe fighting skills of the Slayer but also of her creativity. In ‘‘Helpless,’’ Buffy isdrugged in order to inhibit her physical prowess so that she can go through a rit-ual test called the ‘‘Cruciamentum,’’ in which in her weakened state she mustconfront and defeat a vampire. Quentin Travers, the head of the Watchers’Council, defends the ritual: ‘‘A Slayer is not just physical prowess. She must havecunning, imagination, a confidence derived from self-reliance. And believe me,once this is all over, your Buffy will be stronger for it’’ (‘‘Helpless’’ 3.12). Unlikein the practice of industrial production or the concept of abstract labor, theSlayer is unique and her creativity, her cunning, and her imagination are insepa-rable elements of her power.

It is this cultivated integration of ‘‘head’’ and ‘‘hand,’’ of imagination andskill, that makes slaying craft-like and closer to the notion of meaningful workintroduced above. But embracing her role as the Slayer cannot in itself giveBuffy the experience of work as ‘‘the liberating, consciousness building potentialof the social labor process’’ (Honneth 1995:39). The very fact of being ‘‘chosen’’highlights the denial of the Slayer’s own agency even in the face of the develop-ment of her creativity. As Buffy’s resistance to her calling and her wish to lead a‘‘normal life’’ demonstrate, there are manifold struggles to control the creativitythat gives the Slayer power. The ongoing conflicts with the Watchers’ Councilhighlight the ways that the Slayer must work under conditions imposed uponher. This point is made most forcefully in Season 5 in the episode ‘‘Checkpoint’’(5.12), where the Watchers’ Council has critical information for Buffy and insiststhat she and all of her friends submit to a series of examinations before they willagree to share this information. Although Buffy comes to understand that theCouncil needs her more than she needs the Council because her powers areeffectively unique, even so she negotiates a new relationship with them ratherthan breaking off. Curiously, although she insists that Giles is reinstated as herWatcher and pointedly demands that his pay be restored, she does not insist onany compensation for herself.

The development or cultivation of her creativity, whether in the context ofGiles’s paternal authority or of the bureaucratic control of the Watchers’ Coun-cil, is conducted in conflict with Buffy’s own emergent subjectivity. In this sense,the First Slayer is also right to assert that the Slayer is effectively alone: she doesnot ‘‘walk in this world’’ because her life belongs to others, to other purposes.Her social isolation is one of the significant costs that the Slayer must pay.However, just as the Slayer is not merely a role passed on from generation togeneration but is embodied in a girl, the girl is also embedded in her sociallife. Buffy, as the Slayer, transforms the practice of slaying by including her sociallife in this work—despite the incredulity expressed by Kendra that Buffy wouldhave friends who know that she is the Slayer, or the disdain shown by the Watch-ers’ Council at Buffy’s unorthodox inclusion of ‘‘civilians’’ in her slaying. Sociallabor is the form of social reproduction for humans and Buffy cannot practicethe craft of slaying outside the social relations that define her life. The conflictbetween her need for social life and ‘‘who she is,’’ as Kendra puts it, hasdevastating consequences for Buffy time after time.


Thus for Buffy, the creative practice entailed by slaying must be realized in thecontext of the social world. But in capitalist modernity, life in the social worldentails working. From the perspective of political economy, work is laborpower: a productive input that is remunerated. In this regard, Anya11 the ex-demon is the economist’s kindred spirit:

Anya: When I was a vengeance demon, I caused pain and mayhem, certainly.But I put in a full day’s work doing it, and I got compensated appropriately.…But supervillains want reward without labor, to make things come easy. It’swrong. Without labor there can be no payment, and vice versa. The countrycannot progress. The workers are the tools that shape America. (‘‘DoublemeatPalace’’ 6.12)

Anya personifies the petit-bourgeois perspective on work. She aspires to owna small business.12 She does not shy away from hard work; indeed, from herperspective, hard work ultimately rewards the worker or the small businessowner: the evil results from those who would benefit without working. However,this economic definition of work has nothing to say about the activity of workingitself or what work does to the person performing the activity. This is somethingthat Buffy intuits in this very scene when, in response to Anya’s argument, sherealizes that she too has become a ‘‘tool.’’

Buffy’s obligations to work divide her; they split her normal life off from hercalling. This conversation between Dawn13 and Xander illustrates part of thisproblem by suggesting that Buffy’s calling—her vocation—as a Slayer makes a‘‘normal’’ life inaccessible to her:

Dawn: My friend Janice? Her sister’s a lawyer. Buffy’s never gonna be a lawyer,or a doctor, or anything big.

Xander: She’s a Slayer. She saves the whole world. That’s way bigger.

Dawn: But that means she’s gonna have like crap jobs her entire life, right? Min-imum wage stuff. I mean, I could still grow up to be anything. But for her, this isit. (‘‘Doublemeat Palace’’ 6.12)

For Buffy, her calling and her identity as the Vampire Slayer are in contradic-tion with her various notions of ‘‘normal’’ everyday life. The Slayer is dividedbetween her calling, on the one hand, and, on the other, her wish and her needfor a normal everyday life.

Resisting her calling drives Buffy into an embrace of mundane realities andeveryday life. From the very beginning of the series, in ‘‘Welcome to theHellmouth,’’ Buffy asserts her frustration with having this role and this powerthrust upon her and in her argument with Giles, soon after they first meet, shetells him where she wants her priorities to be:

Giles: You really have no idea what’s going on, do you? You think it’s coinci-dence, your being here? That boy was just the beginning.

Buffy: Oh, why can’t you people just leave me alone?

11As a vengeance demon, Anya specialized in granting wishes for revenge to scorned women. In Season 2, Gilesdestroys the source of her demonic power and she becomes human. She and Xander develop a romantic relation-ship in Seasons 3 and 4, through which she also becomes a Scooby.

12The Magic Box, which becomes a meeting place for the main characters after they graduate from high school.13Dawn appears as Buffy’s younger sister from Season 5 to the end of the series.

185Matt Davies

Giles: Because you are the Slayer. Into each generation a Slayer is born, one girlin all the world, a Chosen One, one born with the strength and skill to hunt thevampires…

Buffy: (interrupts and joins in)… with the strength and skill to hunt thevampires, to stop the spread of their evil, blah, blah, blah. I’ve heard it, okay?

Giles: I really don’t understand this attitude. You, you’ve accepted your duty,you’ve slain vampires before.

Buffy: Yeah, I’ve both been there and done that, and I’m moving on.

Giles: What do you know about this town?

Buffy: It’s two hours on the freeway from Neiman Marcus? (‘‘Welcome to theHellmouth’’ 1.01)

In ‘‘What’s My Line, Part 1,’’ Buffy makes a similar complaint to Angel whenshe describes her high school’s Career Week to him:

Buffy: Right. Well, then you know it’s a whole week of ‘‘what’s my line’’, only…I don’t get to play. Sometimes I just want…

Angel: You want what?

Buffy: (looks up at Angel) The Cliff Notes version? I want a normal life. Like Ihad before. (‘‘What’s My Line? Part 1’’ 2.09)

Thus for Buffy, even in her vocation as Slayer—the context of work thatdepends upon the cultivation of her creativity and self-creation—self-creation isin constant tension with self-denial and self-destruction. Work as the destruc-tion of the self shows up as a critical idea in the transition between Seasons 2and 3. After Buffy must kill Angel in order to save the world, she is expelledfrom school and when her mother finds out that she is the Slayer, she isthrown out of her house. Slaying completes her social isolation. Season 3begins with Buffy having run away to Los Angeles, where she is working as awaitress in a diner under an assumed identity. It is important to note that bytaking the identity of ‘‘Anne’’ (Buffy’s middle name, but also a suggestion ofanonymity), Buffy has already rejected her self. For the bosses of the under-ground Satanic mills, into which runaway teens are taken and used up as slavelabor, depersonalization is crucial to the functioning of the factory and theeconomy:

Demon Guard: You work, and you live. That is all. You do not complain orlaugh or do anything besides work. Whatever you thought, whatever you weredoes not matter. You are no one now. You mean nothing. (‘‘Anne’’ 3.01)

However, self-creation and self-destruction remain in tension for Buffy and themoment comes when the contradiction between everyday life as a grind thatdestroys us and everyday life as the resource we have for realizing our potentialexplodes into an act of self-realization. This moment is revolutionary in the sensethat it contains within it not only this possibility for self-realization but also thepossibility for transforming an alienating system. Buffy resists the death of theself when this moment comes:


Demon Guard: Who are you?

Girl: No one.


Boy: No one.


Buffy looks up at him for a moment and then she smiles and says perkily:

Buffy: I’m Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. And you are…? (‘‘Anne’’ 3.01)

The mayhem that follows Buffy’s act of defiance becomes a factory rebellion,and all the kidnapped people in the Satanic mill flee back to the world. Buffy thenaccepts that she cannot live on only one side of the conflict between her need fora normal everyday life and her calling as the Slayer. She returns to Sunnydale totry to make amends with the people who she abandoned or who rejected her.

In the subsequent seasons, there are numerous moments when Buffy clings toher craving for ordinary things and routines against the extraordinary life of theSlayer. For example, in Season 4, Buffy begins attending a university and falls inlove with Riley, a teaching assistant in her Intro to Psychology course. WhenRiley discovers that Buffy is the Vampire Slayer and Buffy discovers that Riley ispart of a secret military organization called ‘‘the Initiative,’’ which, unknown toBuffy, is trying to create hybrid human-monster soldiers, she tries to work withthe Initiative in order to pursue her relationship with Riley. These compromisesprove impossible when the Initiative decides that Buffy is dangerous because shecannot be controlled and tries to have her killed.

But the contradictions for Buffy between her work as craft (slaying) and herneed for work as production come into sharpest focus in Season 6. Buffy’smother dies in Season 5, leaving Buffy to care for her sister and other membersof her social circle. Buffy also dies at the end of Season 5 and in Season 6, aftershe has been torn out of Heaven to return to Sunnydale to resume her duties asSlayer, this mundane world is ever more painful. Social reproduction takes on amore personal and immediate urgency as bills need to be paid and repairs tothe house taken care of:

Anya: If you wanna pay every bill here, and every bill coming, and have enoughto start a nice college fund for Dawn? (pauses and smiles) Start charging.

Buffy: For what?

Anya: Slaying vampires! Well, you’re providing a valuable service to the wholecommunity. I say cash in.

Buffy: Well, that’s an idea… you would have. Any other suggestions?

Anya: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s not so crazy.

Dawn: Yes it is! You can’t charge innocent people for saving their lives!

Anya: Spiderman does.

Dawn: He does not!

187Matt Davies

Anya: Does too.

Dawn: Does not… (‘‘Flooded’’ 6.04)

Of course, we charge innocent people for saving their lives all the time:someone has to pay the fire department, the police, the emergency medicaltechnicians, etc. And in the Buffyverse, the Watchers council pays the (mostlymale) Watchers, though not the (female) Slayers. The question of the provisionof public goods is not a topic on which political economy is silent: a great dealof thought has been given to precisely the question of how to pay the peoplewho save our lives. Anya compares Buffy to the mythological Spiderman, ratherthan in political economic terms to a surgeon, because she fails to recognize thedivision in the human world between production—in which workers are‘‘tools’’—and self-realization—which depends upon the activity of work becom-ing meaningful.

Work in capitalist modernity depends upon this splitting. In a market society,our well-being depends upon our ability to make ourselves into something thatcan be used by someone else, or we will not receive remuneration for the valu-able thing that we are or that we can do. This value is determined by somethingexternal to us—the demand for what we are or what we can do—thus we makeof ourselves something other that what we are in response to demands articu-lated before and beyond our self-creation.

The dramatic arc of the seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer illustrates howBuffy deals with the division in her life between the comforts and alienations ofeveryday life and the extraordinary capacities and the struggles over their appro-priation as the Slayer. This division is expressed through Buffy’s experience ofwork: on the one hand, the potential for meaningful work is inherent in thecraft-like work of slaying but it is denied in the archaic, hierarchical institutionof the Slayer’s subordination in the Watchers’ Council; on the other hand, Buffyboth craves and is subject to the alienating work of the various menial jobs shetakes. Throughout the series, Buffy is trying to come to terms with being theChosen One in the context of living in capitalist modernity. The Slayer’s workidentity has greater integrity, is less alienated: it is �uvre and not production. Butfor the various reasons discussed, Buffy resists this in favor of her desire for amundane life. How does she resolve the contradiction? This is the key questionfor the final season of the series, but hints about the resolution are giventhroughout the series.

First, as noted in the discussion of ‘‘Anne,’’ Buffy has to accept that she can-not merely shed one side of her identity without losing herself entirely. She mustbe the Slayer—‘‘who she is,’’ as Kendra asserts—while also caring for others inher mundane life. Thus ‘‘who she is’’ is also a deeply social being. The emblemsof collective workers’ rebellion deployed as weapons to be used against demonsin ‘‘Anne’’—a hammer and a sickle she takes up to fight demons while the slavesescape—make this point graphically. In ‘‘Primeval’’ (4.21), the same point ismade in more mystical terms when Giles, Willow, and Xander merge their spiritswith Buffy, magically invoking the power of the First Slayer, in order to defeatthe hybrid monster-soldier Adam. When in the next episode, ‘‘Restless,’’ theFirst Slayer attacks her friends in their dreams, Buffy turns to the mundaneworld for the strength and the resources she needs to overcome the First Slayer,to rescue her friends, and to re-define her own identity as the Slayer.

All of these episodes point toward the way Buffy can, and in Season 7 must,resolve her contradiction by embracing both her role as the Slayer and her root-edness in everyday life. In the fourth episode of Season 7, ‘‘Help’’ (7.04), Buffytakes a job as a high school counselor not despite being a Slayer but in order tokeep an eye on the Hellmouth, which is still located under the Sunnydale High


School building. Later in the season, in ‘‘Never Leave Me’’ (7.09), the Watchers’Council is destroyed in an explosion in an apparent effort to isolate the Slayerfrom the institution that protects and nurtures all potential Slayers. Many poten-tials survive and Giles and others begin to bring them to Sunnydale where Buffycan protect them. Buffy now takes on a leadership role in the absence of thecustomary hierarchy. This turns out to be a necessary but mistaken step, for itpreserves the duality in the hierarchy that is sustained by this division of laborinto creative, imaginative work and routine, subordinated, production. This hier-archical relation transforms Buffy into a dictator and she begins to lose controlover the potentials and her closest allies and friends, who begin fighting amongthemselves. The climax of this internal conflict comes in the episode ‘‘EmptyPlaces’’ (7.19), where the potential slayers rebel and kick Buffy out of her house.

The solution to this problem presents itself to Buffy when she is confrontedwith her nemesis for this season, the First Evil, who reminds her again of theorigin myth of the Slayer:

First: Then why aren’t you asleep in your dead lover’s arms? ‘Cause he can’thelp you. Nor Faith, nor your friends, certainly not your wanna-slay brigade.None of those girlies will ever know real power unless you’re dead. You knowthe drill: ‘‘Into every generation, a slayer is born. One girl in all the world. Shealone will have the strength and skill to—’’ There’s that word again. What youare. How you’ll die. Alone. Where’s your snappy comeback?

Buffy: You’re right.

First: Hmm. Not your best. (‘‘Chosen’’ 7.22)

What Buffy realizes here, what the First has reminded her, is that the mythol-ogy asserts that only one girl can be the Slayer. But without a Watchers’ Councilto enforce this idea, there was no reason that all potentials could not becomeSlayers. Indeed, from the second season when Kendra was introduced, there hadalways been two Slayers. Buffy’s tactic for defeating the First is to transform thestruggle over the creative possibilities of slaying from being the unique gift of asingle person into the collective capacities of all—making all potential Slayersinto Slayers. Where the compulsions and impositions of her mundane worldwork had always been deeply socialized—whether through the highly Taylorizedprogrammed motions in the fast-food industry graphically portrayed in ‘‘Double-meat Palace’’ or through her feelings of care and obligation to Dawn and herfriends—her isolation as Slayer was also always imposed on her by circumstancesbeyond her control and by designs and needs imposed by others. Socializing herpower as the Slayer entailed not only giving all other potential Slayers the samepowers that defined her, but also depended upon the support and sacrifices ofher friends. The resolution is ‘‘all about power,’’ as Buffy explains to Dawn atthe beginning of the season. Buffy changes the rules—with Willow’s help—andsocializes her power: a lesson in the collective reappropriation of the moment ofcreativity in work.

The resolution of all of her struggles occurs when she escapes from theburdens of tradition—‘‘one girl in all the world’’—and transforms all potentialSlayers: she externalizes and objectifies her needs and capabilities, re-makingherself and the world. Thus it is her creativity in work—cultivated by a globalorganization that exists to contain and control this power in the Slayer—that alsopermits her to develop her capacities in society with her friends and both toescape from this control and survive when the organization is destroyed. Hersociability, expressed and developed in her work, allows her to appropriate herown objectified capabilities. The integrity of this gesture goes even deeper

189Matt Davies

because it also allows that meaningful work is not merely about ‘‘being who weare.’’ Rather, it is about having the possibility of defining who we might be. Buffymakes this point to Angel, apropos of her sense of her possibilities for romanticrelationships, when she describes herself as ‘‘cookie dough.’’

Buffy: OK, I’m cookie dough. I’m not done baking. I’m not finished becomingwhoever the hell it is I’m gonna turn out to be. I make it through this, and thenext thing, and the next thing, and maybe one day I turn around and realizeI’m ready. I’m cookies. And then, you know, if I want someone to eat—(her eyeswiden as she realizes what she has said) or enjoy warm, delicious cookie me,then, that’s fine. That’ll be then. When I’m done.

Angel: Any thoughts on who might enjoy—Do I have to go with the cookieanalogy?

Buffy: I’m not really thinking that far ahead. That’s kind of the point.(‘‘Chosen’’ 7.22)

Thus through the series, Buffy develops from a person who is trapped betweenthe burdens and dangers presented by her calling—her vocation—and the com-forts offered by a banal everyday existence, into someone who has the possibilityto define for herself who she wants to be. She effects this transition boththrough the development of her practical consciousness and through her (andWillow’s) articulation of the latent power of the potential slayers. She developsher practical consciousness through her work, or, more precisely, through herresolution of the conflicts between her craft, with its integrity and creativity, andher everyday existence, with its sociability. This resolution signals a crucial cri-tique of work. Buffy’s work, when it is creative but isolated, remains subordinatedto the needs and designs of those who would define her rather than let her cre-ate herself; when it is embedded in social relations of care and support, itbecomes subordinated to a different kind of programming and more facelessforms of subordination. Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s critique of work is the critiqueof the separation of creativity from sociability. When Buffy herself overcomes thisseparation by integrating the power of her calling and craft into the broadercommunity that struggles alongside her, making of herself someone who choosesand is not merely chosen, she is ‘‘confronting a hegemony in the fibres of theself and in the hard practical substance of effective and continuing relation-ships’’ (Williams 1977:212).

From Work to World Politics

Buffy’s solution to the twinned problems of work in her life and of defeating theFirst Evil in the final season poses anew the question of world politics. In effect,the critique of work developed in Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be extended to acritique of the depoliticization effected by IR through its separation of the inter-national from the everyday. This latter problem is in part a problem of space:territorially bounded national states and their representative agents are definedas the ‘‘political’’ actors of IR and membership in this club enables the agents toarticulate managerial, technical, system-preserving solutions to political problems.Politics as such is imagined to be contained in the national space. The possibili-ties for system-transforming politics and political relations are thus contained ordefined away (Walker 1993:125–135).

The spaces in which the Slayer works problematize the vertical hierarchy ofspaces of IR—the individual, subsumed under the state conflated with thenation, subsumed in turn under the international or the systemic. At the outset,


the Slayer and the demons and vampires she fights live and meet in a space thatis shaped and ordered by the binding of sacred or mystical energies and place:for example, in Season 1, the Master is bound in the Hellmouth in Sunnydale;Sunnydale’s mystic positioning is linked to the Mayor’s century-long quest tobecome a demon in Season 3; the space of the graveyard is the ground wheremuch of the slaying must take place. The Watchers’ Council operates in thisspace: the spatial coding of a particular kind of relationship of knowledge topower, one in which a priestly class exercises its power through privileged accessto sacred knowledge. This space is pre-modern; it is Henri Lefebvre’s absolutespace: ‘‘Absolute space is thus also and above all the space of death, the space ofdeath’s absolute power over the living’’ (Lefebvre 1991b:235). In absolute space,nature is fragmented according to the intrinsic qualities of particular sites—-caves, mountaintops, springs, rivers—and the fragments are de-natured throughconsecration (Lefebvre 1991b:48).

Industrialism appears in Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the guise of the Initiative,the secret military-bureaucratic organization that attempts to create demon-soldier hybrids in Season 4. The modern space of the Initiative is not theabsolute space of the demons or of the Slayer. Unlike the absolute space ofdemons, Slayers, and the institutions that operate to guarantee the consecrationof the fragmented space such as the Watchers Council, the space of the Initiativeis abstract space, producing a distinctively modern sovereign14 territoriality.

The Initiative’s pursuit of the demon-soldier hybrid through the harvesting ofdemon and human body parts invokes Frankenstein along with the productionof abstract labor: Adam, the Initiative’s successful experiment in hybridity,embodies abstract labor. Adam is an experimental prototype and amoral. Hisconstruction and his self-reproduction are indifferent to the physical integrity ofthe humans or monsters that the Initiative (and Adam himself) abstract fromhumans or demons: the Initiative and Adam do not want to employ particulardemons or soldiers; they want to acquire or to abstract from these particulardemons and soldiers qualities that can be employed indifferently—and bureau-cratically—to particular circumstances.15 Of course, the Initiative collapses andthe covert operations team is coded as politically suspect—Riley leaves Buffy toparticipate in covert operations in Central America, with connotations of thearguments that were used to justify US intervention in the region. The Initia-tive’s anxiety about Buffy and the threat her ‘‘anarchy’’ poses maps neatly ontothe anxiety David Campbell notes in those strands of IR theory that wish to keepthe state center stage: ‘‘what is behind this anxiety and fear is an often unstatedyet unequivocal commitment enabled by a narrow rationalism to ‘the sovereigntyproblematic’ that restricts the interpretive possibilities of world politics under-stood as international relations’’ (Campbell 1996:17).

14‘‘Sovereignty implies ‘space’, and what is more it implies a space against which violence, whether latent orovert, is directed—a space established and constituted by violence. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the accumu-lation process exploded the framework of small medieval communities, towns and cities, fiefdoms and principalities.Only by violence could technical, demographic, economic and social possibilities be realized. The spread of sover-eign power was predicated on military domination, generally preceded by plunder…. The nation state, based on acircumscribed territory, triumphed over both the city state… and over the imperial state, whose military capabilitieswere eventually overwhelmed’’ (Lefebvre 1991b:280). But compare a different account of modern sovereignty inBuffy the Vampire Slayer in Molloy (2003). Molloy, following Agamben, argues that the camp is the ‘‘paradigmaticstructure of modernity’’ (2003:112); that it is in the realm of bare life where sovereign violence is exercised; thatthe vampire, especially Spike (no longer human, not pure demon, nor after his encounter with the Initiative evenproperly a vampire), is homo sacer; and that sovereign violence loses its particular connection to space as ‘‘bare life‘now dwells in the biological body of every living being’’’ (Molloy 2003:112, citing Agamben).

15‘‘Taylorism, one of the first ‘scientific’ approaches to productivity, reduced the body as a whole to a smallnumber of motions subjected to strictly controlled linear determinations. A division of labour so extreme, wherebyspecialization extends to individual gestures, has undoubtedly had as much influence as linguistic discourse on thebreaking-down of the body into a mere collection of unconnected parts’’ (Lefebvre 1991b:204).

191Matt Davies

The spatial problem for the Slayer is that ‘‘one girl in all the world’’ is notplace-bound: slayers can appear anywhere: Kendra is called from somewhere inthe Caribbean; Spike kills a Chinese slayer during the Boxer Rebellion and laterkills another slayer in New York; in Season 7, potentials appear from all aroundthe world. A further function of the Watchers’ Council is to bind the Slayer tothe absolute space of the demons, a spatial fix that is part of their guild-authorityover her. Buffy’s strategic solution to the First Evil of Season 7 and to her ownproblem in work transforms all potential slayers into actual slayers; as the trans-formation sequence in the episode ‘‘Chosen’’ (7.22) highlights, the potentialslive in all kinds of places. This solution, unlike that suggested by the activities ofthe Initiative and the covert operations team, does not pose abstract space inmodern territorial units as the means of defeating the pre-modern enemy.Instead it opens the possibility for a kind of differential space of transversal glo-bal politics.16 Thus the critique of the splitting of Buffy’s work—Slaying—fromher embodied embeddedness in her social world and everyday life yields thesolution to the threat posed by the First Evil in Season 7 by asserting a transver-sal politics that transforms the spatial binding of politics in both pre-modernabsolute space and in modern IR.

Conclusion

Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents a compelling argument about and critique ofwork. The series explicitly acknowledges the importance of work as the form ofsocial reproduction as well as work’s importance for social integration. Buffy,and other characters as well, learn from their struggles in work: their work is thecontext for their cognitive access to reality. And as social subjects, Buffy and theother characters grow by developing new needs and capacities through realizingexisting ones. Work and creativity are not romanticized here. They are painful,not only because they must be realized in actual bodies working against theresistance of their material and social world to their actions but also because, intheir work, there is loss for all of the characters. But the dramatic arc of thewhole series points to an important lesson for rethinking an emancipatory andhumane concept of work, namely, that it is not enough to reassert the irreduc-ible creative moment in work for the individual worker; the whole social organi-zation of work itself must be ordered in a way to permit the appropriation ofthat creativity by workers collectively and autonomously.

Returning to an earlier observation, the spatial fix of IR theory has depoliticiz-ing consequences in part because it precludes critical or theoretical reflectionson work for world politics. It is no coincidence that the argument about workexamined here is asserted and elaborated not in IR theory but in a document ofpopular culture, a television program about a girl who fights vampires. Indeed,reflections arising from popular culture are much better situated for this kind ofreflection today than theory is.

In 1947, in the first volume of the Critique of Everyday Life—a project that hecontinued to develop until his death in 1991—Henri Lefebvre provides a tersedefinition of everyday life as the ‘‘residue’’ left over when the ‘‘higher’’ activitiesare separated out (Lefebvre 1991a:86). The importance of this definition is thatit links the emergence of a particularly modern everyday with the developmentof the separation of mental activities from the material world—briefly, with the

16For Campbell, ‘‘transversal politics’’ is a critical alternative to ‘‘international politics.’’ He describes this alter-native conception as ‘‘transversal’’ because the term itself displaces ‘‘national’’—as in ‘‘international’’ or ‘‘transna-tional’’—from the conception, thus indicating a possible world politics that does not emerge from a centralpresiding agency located in the state as the sole and source of authority and capable of instrumentally wieldingpower (Campbell 1996:18). This transversal nature of politics enables a political prosaics that does not rest on theabsolute separation of the ‘‘level’’ of the international from that of the everyday. See also Davies (2006).


development of the mental–manual division of labor. The result of this is animpoverishment of both the higher activities and the everyday: philosophybecomes truth without reality, everyday life becomes reality without truth(Lefebvre 1984:14).

It takes a text from popular culture to unpack an emancipatory concept ofwork for theory because theory itself has become alienated from everyday life; itis no longer a question of merely turning our theoretical attention to the every-day because the separation has impoverished the theoretical realm as much as ithas the practical realm (truth without reality, reality without truth). Contempo-rary theoretical understanding needs a mediation, a form of reflection that nec-essarily engages with the dramas of everyday life, to begin to conceptualize anewthe crucial processes that characterize the everyday and lay out the prospects forits transformation: for example, to make work meaningful.

This is no less true for thinking about world politics. The representation ofworld politics as IR is very powerful in itself and it filters out reflections abouteveryday life as effectively as any other ‘‘higher activity’’ does. The critique ofthis representation is not a simple matter of grounding IR in the social practicesthat sustain it. The critique of everyday life is a necessary step for the transforma-tion of world politics as much as for the transformation of everyday life. Giventheory’s self-abstraction from the everyday, it is not surprising that such acritique might operate through the mediation of popular culture.

References

Anderson, Bridget. (2000) Doing the Dirty Work: The Global Politics of Domestic Labour. London: ZedBooks.

Bakker, Isabella, and Stephen Gill, Eds. (2003) Power, Production and Social Reproduction.Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Baudrillard, Jean. (1975) The Mirror of Production. St. Louis, MO: Telos Press.Burawoy, Michael. (1985) The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes Under Capitalism and Socialism.

London: Verso.Campbell, David. (1996) Political Prosaics, Transversal Politics, and the Anarchical World. In Chal-

lenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities, edited by Michael J. Shapiro and Hayward R.Alker. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Cox, Robert. (1987) Production, Power, and World Order. New York: Columbia University Press.Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, and Selma James. (1975) The Power of Women and the Subversion of the

Community, 3rd ed. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.Davies, Matt. (2006) Everyday Life in the Global Political Economy. In International Political Economy

and Poststructural Politics, edited by Marieke de Goede. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Davies, Matt. (2009) Works, Products, and the Division of Labour: Notes for a Cultural and Political

Economic Critique. In Cultural Political Economy, edited by Matthew Patterson and JacquelineBest. London: Routledge.

Davies, Matt, and Magnus Ryner, Eds. (2006) Poverty and the Production of World Politics. Basing-stoke: Palgrave.

Dejours, Christophe. (2007) Subjectivity, Work, and Action. In Recognition, Work, Politics: New Direc-tions in French Critical Theory, edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge, JohnRundell, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Elias, Juanita. (2005) The Gendered Political Economy of Control and Resistance from the ShopFloor of the Multinational Firm: A Case Study from Malaysia. New Political Economy 10(2):203–222.

Elson, Diane. (2002) International Financial Architecture: A View from the Kitchen. Femina Politica:Zeitschrift fur Feminstische Politik-wissenschaft, 11 Jg., Heft 1: 26–37.

Federici, Silvia. (2004) Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. New York:Autonomedia.

Habermas, Jurgen. (1987[1968]) Knowledge and Human Interest. Cambridge: Polity Press.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard

University Press.

193Matt Davies

Harrod, Jeffrey. (1987) Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker. New York: Columbia UniversityPress.

Harrod, Jeffrey. (1997) Social Forces and International Political Economy: Joining the Two IRs.In Innovation and Transformation in International Studies, edited by Stephen Gill and JamesMittelman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Honneth, Axel. (1995) Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory.In The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, edited by Charles W.Wright. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Honneth, Axel. (2007a) Work and Recognition: A Redefinition. Paper presented to the Recognitionand Work International Conference, Macquarie University. Audio recording available at: http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/Recognition/conf2007/audio.html. (Accessed March 10, 2008.)

Honneth, Axel. (2007b) The Work of Negativity: A Psychoanalytical Revision of the Theory ofRecognition. In Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory, edited byJean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge, John Rundell, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Leiden,Boston: Brill.

Larner, Wendy. (2002) Globalization, Governmentality and Expertise: Creating a Call CentreLabour Force. Review of International Political Economy 9(4): 650–674.

Larner, Wendy, and Maureen Molloy. (2009) Globalization, the New Economy and WorkingWomen: Theorizing from the New Zealand Designer Fashion Industry. Feminist Theory 10(1):35–59.

Lazzaratto, Maurizio. (1996) Immaterial Labour. In Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,edited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Lefebvre, Henri. (1976) The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Relations of Production. London:Allison and Busby.

Lefebvre, Henri. (1984) Everyday Life in the Modern World. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publish-ers.

Lefebvre, Henri. (1991a) Critique of Everyday Life vol. 1. London: Verso.Lefebvre, Henri. (1991b) The Production of Space. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.Levine, David. (2010) Object Relations, Work and the Self. Hove, UK, and New York: Routledge.Levine, David, and S. Abu Turab Rizvi. (2005) Poverty, Work and Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Molloy, Patricia. (2003) Demon Diasporas: Confronting the Other and the Other-Worldly in Buffy

the Vampire Slayer and Angel. In To Seek Out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction andWorld Politics, edited by Jutta Weldes. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Ross, Andrew. (2004) No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs. Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press.

Salzinger, Leslie. (2003) Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley:University of California Press.

Sennett, Richard. (1998) The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the NewCapitalism. New York: W.W. Norton.

Sennett, Richard. (2008) The Craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Walker, R.B.J. (1993) Inside ⁄Outside: International Relations as Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Wall, Brian, and Michael Zryd. (2002) Vampire Dialectics: Knowledge, Institutions and Labour.

In Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel, edited by RozKaveney. New York and London: I.B. Tauris.

Williams, Raymond. (1977) Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.Young, Brigitte. (2001) The ‘Mistress’ and the ‘Maid’ in the Globalized Economy. In Socialist

Register 2001: Working Classes, Global Realities, edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. London:Merlin Press.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Episodes

‘‘Welcome to the Hellmouth’’ 1.01.‘‘What’s My Line? Part 1’’ 2.09.‘‘What’s My Line? Part 2’’ 2.10.‘‘Anne’’ 3.01‘‘Helpless’’ 3.12.‘‘Primeval’’ 4.21.


‘‘Restless’’ 4.22.‘‘Checkpoint’’ 5.12.‘‘Flooded’’ 6.04.‘‘Doublemeat Palace’’ 6.12.‘‘Lessons’’ 7.01.‘‘Help’’ 7.04.‘‘Never Leave Me’’ 7.09.‘‘Empty Places’’ 7.19.‘‘Chosen’’ 7.22.

195Matt Davies

“you can’t charge innocent people for saving their lives!” work in buffy the vampire slayer

Documents