The Undoing of Joss Whedon

The Buffy creator, once an icon of Hollywood feminism, is now an outcast accused of misogyny. How did he get here?

- By Lila Shapiro. Photographs by Ryan Pfluger, Alamy, Robert Gauthier, Jason Kirk, Justin Lubin, Shutterstock, Theo Wargo, Wireimage, Picturelux, The Hollywood Archive, AF Archive, DC Entertainment, Warner Bross

IN THE FALL OF 2002, 160 scholars convened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. They were an eclectic group—theologians, philosophers, linguists, film professors—and they had descended on the medieval city for a conference dedicated to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a cult television show about a teenage girl who fights monsters while attending high school in Southern California. It was not a typical academic gathering. There were life-size cutouts of the eponymous heroine as well as Buffy-themed chocolates, action figures, and, in the welcome bags, exfoliating moisturizers (“Buffy the Backside Slayer”). Professors stalked around in long black leather coats like the vampire Spike, Buffy’s enemy and, later, her lover.

If the line between scholarship and fandom was vanishingly thin, so was the line between fandom and worship. On the first morning of the conference, David Lavery, a professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, stood at the podium and declared the show’s creator, Joss Whedon, the “avatar” of a new religion, the “founder of a new faith.” Lavery and two other professors would go on to establish the Whedon Studies Association, an organization devoted to expanding the field of