White Girls in the Apocalypse: Race, Gender, and Sexuality at the End of the World

Abstract

The post-apocalyptic white girl savior is merely one installment in a long line of young adult tropes for female characters. Popular media in the post-apocalyptic girl savior subgenre include novels and media adaptations of The Hunger Games (2008; 2012), and The Red Queen (2015), and television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), Once Upon a Time (2011), Van Helsing (2016), Wynonna Earp (2016), and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018). Critical discussions of whiteness in film, television, and literature independently draw attention to how each of these forms constructs race and cultural belonging. In this article, I draw from all three formats in order to interrogate formations of whiteness specific to teen and young adult women. Valerie Babb comments that “because it is a created identity, whiteness is sustained through hegemony, a complex network of cultural creations, including among other things, literature, museums, popular music, and movies” (Babb 4-5). Building on Babb’s assertion of the omnipresence of whiteness in culture, the cross-media scope of this project shows the consistency of racial assumptions across platforms. This discussion of white girl saviors is particularly important since these stories are often left out of critical discussions of the White Savior trope. The white girl saviors in these stories often win at the expense of people of color, reifying whiteness, and specifically white reproductive femininity as the anchor of moral right and cultural progress. I identify six common traits that the post-apocalyptic girl savior subgenre uses to substantiate its heroines’ whiteness as a central and natural aspect of heroism including: belonging to the lower socio-economic class, being the chosen one, being uncomfortable with her symbolic role, being at the center of a love triangle, caring for a child, and being a tragic figure. These traits reflect larger patterns that scholars such as Richard Dyer explicitly link to the cultural naturalization of whiteness and power, and I argue, establish certain cultural expectations for teen activists that ignore the historical patterns of activism and may create hostility toward, or even foreclose opportunities for, activists who do not meet these requirements.