Blood Relations: Chosen Families in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel

by Jes Battis

The television series Buffy and Angel revolve around radical conceptions of family. Indeed, their coherence depends on the establishment of nontraditional families that admit vampires, demons, witches, werewolves, and other bizarre characters without censuring them for their peculiarities. This work argues that what makes these characters enduring and engaging is their critical family connections--for their most involved struggles occur not within the graveyard, but around the dinner table, just as the most challenging adversarial forces that they must face are not demons or vampires but the stuff of everyday life. What does "family" encompass within these two series? How does it relate to concepts of gender, sexuality, power and the supernatural as they emerge from the shows' complex narratives? This book explores such questions. It also examines the "chosen family" (an idea marketed specifically by successful programs such as Friends and Sex in the City within the past ten years), juxtaposing it against various images of the fractured biological family displayed in both Buffy and Angel. Through eight chapters addressing various family-related aspects within both shows, this work plots the trajectory of this unstable notion of family, even as it is transformed, remediated, and rendered unrecognizable from a "family values" perspective by the unique and supernatural relationships that proliferate in Buffy and Angel.

Genres: Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Nonfiction, Pop Culture, Vampires

190 pages, Paperback

First published June 23, 2005

About the author

Jes Battis (they/them) is the author of THE WINTER KNIGHT (April 2023), the OCCULT SPECIAL INVESTIGATOR series, and the PARALLEL PARKS series. Jes writes in the areas of urban fantasy, horror, and mystery/thriller. They also teach literature and creative writing in the Canadian prairies.