At Home in the Whedonverse

From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Joss Whedon’s work presents various representations of home spaces that give depth to his stories and storytelling. Through the spaceship in Firefly, a farmhouse in Avengers: Age of Ultron or Whedon’s own house in Much Ado About Nothing, his work collectively offers audiences the opportunity to question the ways we relate to and inhabit homes.
Focusing on his television series, films and comics, this collection of new essays explores the diversity of home spaces in Whedon’s many ’verses, and the complexity these spaces afford the narratives, characters, objects and relationships within them.

Juliette C. Kitchens is an assistant professor in the Department of Writing and Communication at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She teaches an array of courses focused on the rhetorics of popular culture and has published in Studies in Popular Culture.

Edited by Juliette C. Kitchens

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 212
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2017
pISBN: 978-1-4766-6702-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-2982-7
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Locating Home: Unraveling the Domestic

Entanglements in the Whedonverse (Juliette C. Kitchens) 1
Genius, Billionaire, Playboy, Prometheus: Transhumanism and Proxemics in the Works of Joss Whedon (Dustin Dunaway) 11
It’s Joss Whedon’s World and We’re All Just Livin’ in It: The “Closed Frame” of the Whedonverse (Kirk ­Hendershott-Kraetzer) 27
Broken but Home: Institutions, Control and the ­Non-Place in Dollhouse (Catherine Pugh) 48
Seeking Safe Haven: Shelter and ­Self-Protection from Afterlife to Avengers: Age of Ultron (Valerie Estelle Frankel) 68
Domestic Space and Identity: Joss Whedon’s Futuristic Frontier in Firefly (Melanie A. Marotta) 87
Scythe Matters: Performing Object-Oriented Ontology on Domestic Space in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Julie L. Hawk) 104
Deliver Us from Evil: Demons, Feminism and Rhetorical Spaces in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Victoria Willis) 122
Militarization of the Domestic Space: Positioning Buffy as a ­Post-Feminist Heroine through the Lens of Choice Feminism (Karen Walsh) 142
Classrooms, Classrooms Everywhere, but Not to Slay or Think: The Domestic Learning Environments of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Melanie A. Jensen and Kyle William Bishop) 165
A Home at the End of the World: The Future of Domesticity in the Whedonverse (Lisa K. Perdigao) 182

About the Contributors 199
Index 201