i love your essays but it's so wild to see these analyses carefully crafted and based on a deep reading of the text next to the things you write about faith, where half of it is entirely fabricated or based on wishful thinking. like i get it, shipping goggles are a hell of a drug but do you not remember the time she had sex with xander? or the time after that where she tried to rape and kill him? but sure lesbian icon doesn't understand straight people or whatever.
Hoo. Okay. Let's get into this.
So I reblogged this post on my main yesterday:
I was definitely thinking about this blog because I do just like to drop semi-serious observations and shitposts sometimes. My shitposts have a different energy from my essays because sometimes I'm in a mood to engage with the show one way and sometimes I'm in the mood for another way. I don't want to take myself hyper-seriously, and just because I make silly posts sometimes, don't think that means I don't understand themes and narratives.
That said, everything I say about Faith is 100% based on the show and a deep reading of it. I see the Faith of the show and I read her as both gay and in love with Buffy. I believe that this is the most logical, coherent, and interesting interpretation of her character. If you have a particular point that you think is fabricated then please, point it out, I am happy to either get a reality check if I have allowed outside sources to affect my reading (which happens to Everyone, because that's how media consumption works), or defend my point if I believe that what I've said is supported by the show.
The thing about Faith (and any character, but it's particularly noticeable with Faith) is that the character we see on screen does not necessarily line up with the one the writers intended to create. I have posted before about how adding certain ingredients to Faith's character can create something entirely unexpected that's also entirely based on those ingredients. Faith may not have been intentionally written as a gay character but she reads very clearly to me as gay. That is not based on wishful thinking, it's based on the text of the show, and I will ardently defend that.
Like, to take your example, yes I do remember her sleeping with Xander. I also remember her expressing dissatisfaction with the sex and a need to shower immediately afterwards. She is similarly dismissive towards the other men she sleeps with. I think it's likely that it was written this way to present Faith as this Cool Girl who gets around, but what is literally presented on screen is a woman who canonically Does Not Enjoy sex with any of the men she sleeps with. It therefore becomes very easy to read her as a lesbian experiencing Compulsory Heterosexuality.
I also remember her, in the very next episode, being weirdly invested in her belief that Buffy slept with Xander, and repeatedly insisting that she must have. This is... strange behaviour, to say the least. Why is so invested in this? Why does Faith comprehensively and exclusively pursue men that Buffy dated, to the point that she has to double-check after the fact that Buffy actually did have sex with this one. The thematic answers are that she represents Buffy's repressed sexual desires, and that she is a figure of Envy who threatens Buffy's position in the narrative. But created within the fiction of the show is a character whose love live is solely crafted around Buffy Summers, and I have to ask, within the fiction of the show, why?
(I also do not see why her assault of Xander should have any relevance, and that is very clearly an instance of her spiraling and re-enacting her own trauma, and not based in actual desire of any kind.)
So yeah, I do remember her sleeping with Xander. I'm not ignoring that with my reading. I believe that her actions and behaviour around that event actively support my reading. Other readings are valid, but I believe in mine. I think that the way Faith's character as a whole makes more significantly sense as a gay character than as a straight one (reading her as bi also makes sense, but I prefer the lesbian interpretation).
Here's the thing - behaviour does not dictate sexuality. Lesbians can date and have sex with men. In fact, most will, because we live in a patriarchal, heteronormative society, and heterosexual behaviour is both expected and enforced by society. The only somewhat coherent way to assign sexuality is by self-identification. People are what they say they are at that time (even if those labels can and do change. As someone who has at various points identified as every letter in the LGBTQ acronym (yes, all of them) I am aware of this).
And as I said in my post on reading Buffy as bi - none of these characters can self-identify because none of them are real. They do not have sexualities. None of them, including the "straight" characters. All they are is a construct of dialogue, framing, costume, acting choices, and a hundred other things that can make up a fictional character. They're the shadows on Plato's cave. We as viewers then interpret these shadows, construct an image, and assign sexualities to those characters based on what we see. These images can be interpreted in different ways. That doesn't mean all interpretations are equal - I think an interpretation of Tara as bisexual or Gunn as gay would be hard-pressed for evidence. But the point is, sexuality only exists in the interpretation, and different interpretations can be valid.
And even within the fiction of the show, let's be very clear about this - Faith never self-identifies. She never says that she's straight, or that she's gay, or that she's bisexual. Actually, the only characters that do explicitly self-identify are gay. Willow, Tara, Larry, Kennedy. Why do the gay characters have to self-identify and the straight ones don't? Because we live in a heteronormative society, where heterosexuality is an assumed default. Every character is presumed to be straight unless otherwise stated. This is, to use an academic term, hot bullshit.
This is about Faith's attraction towards Buffy rather than her hypothetical lesbianism specifically, but one question I always find it useful to ask when looking at an ambiguously-romantic same-gender relationship is "would this be ambiguous if it was straight?". If Faith was a male character, and we saw him gazing softly in at Buffy, and then looking shocked and saddened when he sees her with another man - would there be any debate over whether or not he had romantic feelings for Buffy? Would interpreting that moment as romantic be "wishful thinking", or just a fair interpretation given the visual language being used? If three years later, this character was told by an omniscient force that they "always wanted Buffy to love [him]", and he responded with silence and a guilty, knowing look - would there be an insistence that this was meant entirely platonically, or would it just be blithely accepted as romantic?
I keep thinking of that phrase: "wishful thinking". I notice that an awful lot of the time, reading a character as queer, or interpreting a relationship between two same-gender people as romantic is referred to as "wishful thinking", or "reading into things", or "shipping goggles". These terms are never thrown at people who read heterosexuality into things. I've seen people say after seeing S2 that they read Xander's "I love you" to Willow as romantic. Or after S4 that they think Spike might have feelings for Buffy. Or after S3 they think that Willow is straight. Some of these are supported by the later development of the text, some are contradicted, and some remain ambiguous. But in all cases, I note that these readings are never, not once met with accusations of "wishful thinking". Even if people disagree, the interpretation is allowed to stand, it's just disagreed with, while queer interpretations are delegitimised. Reading Willow as straight is just common sense. Reading Faith as gay is wishful thinking. A higher burden of proof is demanded of queer interpretations for no other reason than the double standard that heteronormative thinking has created.
I don't know what your sexuality is, anon. You might be queer, you might be straight. I don't know and I don't care. What I am absolutely tired of is the constant stream of dismissiveness that comes overwhelmingly from straight fans towards queer fans who have queer readings. It is always steeped in this mindless assumption that anything not explicitly labelled as gay is by default straight. That queerness is inherently frivolous and oppositional to Real Deep Analysis, and not actually an important part of that analysis.
I'm tired of it from the fans, and I'm tired of it from the show. The writers and actors have both spoken multiple times about the "lesbian subtext" that was imbued into Faith's character and the Faith/Buffy relationship. This is an active ingredient that they were aware they were using. They "played with" coding Faith as queer and using romantic tropes between Buffy and Faith. And then they are shocked, shocked, that some fans then interpret Faith as queer and Buffy/Faith as romantic. The heteronormativity runs so deep that queer readings are regarded as fanciful even when queerness has been intentionally injected.
No. Fuck that. I'm done. If you want to interpret Faith as straight, go ahead. Write essays that support that reading and explain away all the moments that indicate her romantic feelings for a woman and her lack of actual genuine desire towards men. No, I mean it, please do that. I support it. I like reading alternative viewpoints. But I am done with blanket assertions of heterosexuality as a default and feeling like I need to link pages of sourced evidence every time I say a character is gay.
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