What are we but our friends?

Via james_davis_nicoll/james_nicoll.

Call for papers: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Works of Joss Whedon

Hopefully this will not be dominated by essays on "vampires are perfect metaphors for ethnic minorities and Buffy is a genocidal racist for not having a fluffy romantic happy ending with unsouled Spike killing them". (The inclusion of "Human/vampire relationships as miscegenation" and "Explorations of intercultural dynamics across imagined racial boundaries/ demon-human hybridity" are both worrying.)

I particularly hope there's something there on the Buffy TV show's and even more so the comic's uncritical association of feminism with "21st-century white American middle-class culture" and assumption that any non-white woman who isn't totally assimilated into it must be a helpless victim of racially-stereotyped sexism.