Lost Girl: Popular Feminism and Fables

by: Andrea Braithwaite , June 14, 2021

In Lost Girl (Showcase 2010-2015), folklore and fairy tales are real: werewolves work for the local police department, selkies strip in the nearby nightclubs, and the Norse goddess of fate has a bungalow in the burbs. Heroine Bo, a private investigator, sets out to solve supernatural crimes. She reconnects a will-o’-the-wisp with his long-lost human son, helps golf course employees uncover the land wight preying on their colleagues, and convinces estranged brothers to reconnect after a banshee prophesies a death in their family. When she is not working (and even sometimes when she is), Bo seeks out new sexual experiences which provide the energy she needs as a succubus, or as her best friend affectionately calls her, a ‘Wondersnatch’.

In a world where mythical figures like valkyrie, sirens, and leanan sidhe are commonplace, Bo—a crime-solving, bisexual, polyamorous succubus—is nearly unremarkable. Lost Girl’s use of folklore and fairy tales frames its representations of gender, power, and sexuality to try to make the extraordinary seem ordinary. As such, we can ask: what aspects of our social and cultural norms do such uses encourage us to imagine differently—and which ones remain the same? What kinds of crimes does Bo investigate, and what do these crimes reveal about the power and resistance? What sorts of discussions does Lost Girl invite about popular representations of women and of feminism? By looking at the gendered forms of power and agency present in this speculative society, we can reflect critically on contemporary mediated perceptions of gender, genre, and feminism.

Lost Girl imagines a social world in which women and men can wield power in equal measure, making gender equality unremarkable and unquestioned. To do so, the series negotiates popular understandings of crime, femininity, and feminism by inflecting the woman detective narrative—a genre already full of characters challenging social norms—with folkloric and fairy tale figures. These elements establish a fantastic atmosphere in which Lost Girl’s stories proceed as if these elements are real and its unconventional gender and genre representations are humdrum. And Bo becomes an action heroine, part of an increasingly visible set of pop culture protagonists that deliberately confront gender and genre stereotypes. Lost Girl also draws heavily on popular and neoliberal feminisms: media discourses that present women’s happiness as a matter of individual choice, self-responsibility, and personal entrepreneurialism. Taking a close look at the ways in which Lost Girl leverages these discourses can help us unpack how television participates in the popularisation of feminism, and how some issues become more—and less—visible along the way.

Women Detectives and Pop Feminism

Running on Showcase from 2010-2016, Lost Girl was created by Canadian showrunner Michelle Lovretta, an ardent advocate for inclusive television (after Lost Girl Lovretta helmed the space opera Killjoys [Space/SyFy 2015-2019], another series widely praised for its representations of gender, sexuality, and genre [O’Regan 2020]). One of Canada’s specialty cable channels, Showcase initially branded itself the home of provocative adult programming, and shifted emphasis to crowd-pleasing science fiction and fantasy television in 2009. A flagship series in this rebranding, Lost Girl quickly amassed a dedicated fan base and nabbed numerous fan awards, many applauding the series’ lesbian and bisexual relationships. The series was also nominated for 15 primarily technical Canadian television industry awards, suggesting that its mastery of slick ‘action aesthetics’ (Tasker 2016) contributed to its success.

This is apparent in the series’ premiere episode ‘It’s a Fae, Fae, Fae, Fae World,’ which launches the viewer immediately into a scene of sex, violence, and mystery. Bo is working as a hotel bartender when she spies a customer slipping something into a young woman’s drink and then following her into the elevator. Bo intervenes, putting herself between the nearly incapacitated woman and the would-be attacker, feigning sexual interest in order to get close enough to drain a mysterious blue aura from between his parted lips. She leaves him a grinning, empty husk on the elevator floor and takes the young woman, a street kid named Kenzi, home to recover. To Kenzi’s dismay, Bo has no real answers when she demands to know what happened—and how. The next day a mysterious black van corners them in an alley and two men throw Bo into the back. She is taken to a roomful of strangers who tell her the truth they presumed she already knew: Bo is one of the Fae: powerful, magical creatures that humanity believes only exist in legends and stories. Bo herself is a succubus, a species that generates and feeds upon sexual energy—chi, the blue aura. Although Fae are divided into two clans, the Light and the Dark, Bo refuses to swear allegiance to either and chooses independence instead. By the third episode, she and Kenzi have set up their own private investigation agency and are handing out flyers that read: ‘Need help? No one believes you? Specialising in the strange and paranormal’. (‘Oh Kappa, My Kappa’) Rumours about the ‘unaligned succubus’ spread quickly and Bo takes on her first cases, from both human clients who fear the police will not believe them, and Fae clients in need of a neutral party. This is far from simple, however, as Bo has little knowledge of either Fae or human criminal justice systems. She succeeds thanks to a combination of determination, creative problem solving, and sharing information with wolf shifter Dyson and siren Hale, two Light Fae with day jobs as police officers, as well as Trick, the owner of the Fae-only bar the Dal Riata and later revealed to be Bo’s grandfather and a Light Fae Elder.

This combination of crime-fighting and supernatural drama, quite literally fuelled by sex, is how Lost Girl sets itself apart in the now-crowded field of women detectives on television. Following what Kathleen Gregory Klein points to as a ‘mini-explosion of women detectives’ in fiction in the 1990s (1995 [1988]: 231), they have become increasingly visible in pop culture. (see also Mizejewski 2004) On television, as Deborah Jermyn contends, they are even an ordinary, expected part of any crime series, and as such ‘must somehow offer something ‘extra’ to survive, to present an identifiable ‘Unique Selling Point’ (USP), in an era where the presence of a female detective in itself is no longer worthy of remark, nor an innovation or novelty in itself’. (2017: 260) By drawing on fairy tales and folklore as its USP, Lost Girl is also part of a genre that uses ‘fairy-tale allusions, structures, and characters … to repudiate the fairy tale’s repressive fantasies and to foreground feminist themes’. (Haase 2000: 32; see also Craven 2018; Seifert 2015)

Pop culture’s representational strategies, particularly ‘television history, [in which] the term independent has functioned as an important euphemism for feminist’ situate Bo as a figure of popular feminism. (Perkins and Schreiber 2019: 921, emphasis in original) Characterised by ‘spectacular, media-friendly expressions such as celebrity feminism and corporate feminism,’ popular feminism is ‘a ‘happy’ feminism, one that is about uplift’—a discourse in which representations of some women achieving some success in some places stand in for structural equality. (Banet-Weiser, Gill & Rottenberg 2019: 11) Yet, rather than dismiss popular feminism as an ‘inferior’ version of a more ‘legitimate’ feminism, we should instead identify the elements making feminism popular in this cultural moment. In tracking this newfound popularity, Sarah Banet-Weiser highlights how popular feminism ‘materializes as a kind of media that is widely visible and accessible’. (2018: 9) She cautions against equating such visibility with political progress, however, reminding us of the commercial imperatives that condition popular feminism’s circulation: ‘[i]n a media context in which most circuits of visibility are driven by profit, competition, and consumers, simply becoming visible doesn’t guarantee that identity categories such as a gender, race, and sexuality will be unfettered from sexism, misogyny, and homophobia’. (2018: 11) By taking a close look at the attitudes and ideas television helps to circulate as feminism we can see how heroines like Lost Girl’s Bo become resources for articulating this popular feminism in the first place.

Fighting Fae Crime

Some of Bo’s feminist resonance lies in how she is unafraid to challenge the Fae status quo, illustrating ‘the complex push-pull appeal of the female investigator to/within feminism’. (Jermyn 2017: 272) In the first few seasons especially, Bo fights for the vulnerable and the marginalised, exposing the traditional forms of power that govern Fae society. For example, in ‘Fae Gone Wild’ Bo meets with a mother who is convinced a photo in a news story about a heist from a police precinct is of her daughter Sheri, who left home years ago and has not been heard from since. Bo tracks the perpetrators to a local strip club where Sheri is a dancer. Sheri and her colleagues are selkies—Fae who can shapeshift into seals—and the club owner has confiscated their pelts to force the women into working for him. They stole a Hand of Glory, a tool for bypassing magical alarm systems, so that the dancers could reclaim their pelts and finally escape. Bo argues with Dyson and Hale about whose actions are truly wrong in this situation; they see the high-profile crime as the biggest problem because it threatens Fae secrecy, while Bo blames the owner for forcing Sheri and her friends to work as dancers, since few take crimes against sex workers seriously: ‘Sheri doesn’t have anyone else in her corner, I am not turning my back on her.’ Like many other women detective characters, Bo is ‘conscious of gender as a way in which the social system categorizes, judges, and responds to people’. (Klein 1995 [1988]: 202) Bo advocates letting Sheri and her selkie friends off the hook in the name of justice—’She saved these women from servitude. She deserves to be free’—and argues that the club owner no longer deserves the protection of his Fae clan because used his position to prey on, rather than support, the women he employs.

Bo confronts sexualised violence again in ‘The Mourning After,’ another example of how woman detective narratives ‘tend to explore the gender-related issues that can arise from having a woman as the focus’. (Gates 2011: 35) Bo is approached by a woman, Colette, whose sister Allison has seemingly committed suicide—she was found in her tub with her hairdryer, with words like ‘filthy whore,’ ‘dirty slut,’ and ‘skank’ scrawled all over the bathroom walls. Colette is convinced the suicide was staged, since Allison had been happy and excited about meeting someone new. Retracing Allison’s steps, Bo stumbles across a Fae hunting humans at speed-dating events. Bertram is an albaster, and feeds on sexual shame; he has been meeting young women, having sex with them, and then belittling their behaviour so relentlessly they are driven to suicide. Bo angrily condemns his behaviour: ‘Judging others is the only thing that gets you off … You are a pathetic hypocrite, and now you know it.’ She is incensed by how his actions are implicitly sanctioned as a corollary of the Fae disinterest in human life, and goes after the albaster herself.

Bertram is not the only Fae operating with impunity before Bo’s arrival. As her contacts in the Fae community are quick to remind her, most Fae see humans as simply food. Wayne, the villain of ‘Oh Kappa, My Kappa,’ has been kidnapping sorority girls because he sees them as nothing more than ‘privileged bitches,’ and trading them to a demon in order to extend his own lifespan. In ‘Dead Lucky’ Bo spars with one of Dyson’s informants, a body jumper who has been set up with a job at the city morgue because he likes to inhabit the bodies of dead women so that he can molest them. And in ‘(Dis)Members Only’ one of Kenzi’s friends comes looking for help: his buddy Thumper has vanished from his landscaping gig at an exclusive country club, which caters to the powerful and successful while relying on the labour of undocumented immigrants. It turns out Thumper isn’t the only missing employee; the head chef is a land wight (a nature Fae in symbiosis with the land) who has been gifting club members with incredible boons, such as promotions, in exchange for easy access to human snacks: the untraceable, under-the-table employees. Lost Girl frequently makes use of what Jack Zipes calls fairy tales’ ‘moral pulse’: the stories imaginatively identify ‘what we lack and how the world has to be organised differently so that we receive what we need,’ in its recognition of the systemic ways gender, class, and race can make some populations less visible and more vulnerable than others. (2012: 14)

Allegorising Race

These intersecting factors illustrate the complex politics of making feminism popular. As Banet-Weiser notes, ‘[p]opular feminism is also about specific exclusions,’ focusing on ‘women’ and ‘women’s issues’ most compatible with dominant discourses of power and gender: ‘primarily white, middle-class, cis-gendered, and heteronormative. This is the popular feminism that seizes the spotlight in an economy of visibility and renders others less visible’. (2018: 13) Bo is conventionally attractive, young, and White, as are most of the Fae. While Hale, the only recurring character of colour, is written into a position of power as the acting Ash (leader of the Light Fae), his promotion absents him from most episodes. On top of this, Hale is killed shortly after resigning his post, leaving Bo’s personal and professional circle entirely White—a homogeneity at odds with the series’ diverse mythical figures, yet well-suited to popular feminism’s spotlight.

One way Lost Girl represents the politics of race is via the Fae attitude towards humans as an inferior species used primarily for servitude. Through this thinly veiled allegory for racism, the ‘parables presented remove real histories and current experiences from the story’. (Zisman Newman 2020: 155) In ‘The Girl who Fae’d with Fire,’ human Kenzi agrees to act as Hale’s girlfriend at his family’s lavish cocktail party. As clan heir, Hale wants to model for others his conviction that ‘The Fae can co-exist with the humans peacefully, as equals. Moreover, we should.’ Yet Hale’s sister Val scolds him for bringing a human into the house, and advises the staff to ‘Wash the silverware the human uses at least twice. Better just pitch it.’ Family patriarch Sturgess refuses to speak to Kenzi directly, and remarks ‘You’re dating this?’ when they are first introduced. Having a powerful Black family treat a young White woman as little more than an animal under the guise of supernatural social formations ignores the realities of anti-Black racism, ‘in effect making history irrelevant and oppression circumstantial instead of systemic’. (Zisman Newman 2020: 155)

This recasting, seemingly to showcase Bo as more progressive and even more feminist than her peers, highlights the importance of attending to the series’ representations of race. Creatures like Japanese akaneme, Chilean cherufe, Lithuanian aitvaras, Sumerian edimmu, and the djieien from Seneca mythology all show up in the same urban space. Bo’s perspective becomes the primary point of knowledge about their meaning, erasing other sociocultural contexts, and often scripting characters of colour as villains in the process. ‘By centralizing empowered women heroines,’ Laine Zisman Newman notes, Lost Girl sets up ‘some bodies, who abide by accepted norms, as proper respectable citizens at the expense of other less conforming subjects’. (2020: 148) For example, the Egyptian serket is the goddess of healing, nature, and medicine; she is revered as a protector of humans and gods due to her ability to ward against snakebites and venom. In contrast, ‘Table for Fae’ features a pair of serket sisters running a spa, as a front for siphoning life essence from young backpackers passing through the hostel next door, and selling it in expensive anti-aging treatments. Only Bo can put them back on the right path, by impressing upon them the error of their ways: ‘It’s a pretty shaky interpretation of giving life … killing innocent kids so that trophy wives can fit their bikinis better.’ Now saved from her own poor choices, one serket tells Bo: ‘Thank you. I wasn’t strong enough to do that myself.’ Bo’s standpoint, rather than their own heritage and legacy, is what saves both the serkets and their human victims.

This approach recurs in depictions of Indigenous figures and folklore. In ‘Can’t See the Fae-rest,’ Bo meets Maganda, a batibat. Magically entwined with the tree that she calls home, Maganda becomes enraged when it is cut down and used to make high-end furniture and accessories. Played by Cree actor Pamela Matthews, Maganda first appears as a homeless person in a police station and she answers Bo’s questions in half-sentences full of nature imagery. Maganda is killing everyone who has a piece of her tree, behaviour Trick describes as ‘primal, almost animal’—common tropes in media narratives of Indigenous peoples. (Brady & Kelly 2017; Clark 2014) Against Canada’s ongoing anti-Indigenous practices and policies (Human Rights Watch 2020), Bo’s White Saviour status ‘offers the possibility of restitution of land and the true pleasure of heroism without asking us to be accountable for our own complicity in a system that continues to disenfranchise Indigenous women’. (Zisman Newman 2020: 159)

Only rarely does Bo need to leave the city, and when she does rural, non-Western places are depicted as exotic and dangerous. In ‘Masks’ Bo discovers that Lauren’s comatose girlfriend Nadia has been cursed by a shaman. Teleported to his location by a Fae travel agent, Bo finds herself in a bare hut in a dark, remote jungle. The shaman Tshombe speaks with a thick accent and sports extensive face paint, a stereotype of African spiritualism that reinforces the gap between the White, urban Fae of Bo’s social world and the tribal Otherness that threatens it. This is underscored by Bo’s reaction to Tshombe’s social function. He is accepted as an authority figure and arbiter of right and wrong by his community, enacting his verdict by hammering magical cursing nails into a post. Bo rejects his rulings, yanking out not just the nail that represents Nadia but others as well. Tshombe frantically tries to stop her: ‘You have no idea what you are doing! … Not all the cursed are innocent people, not even by your standards. This one is a violent man who beats his wife and children. This is a traitor, who led his soldiers into battle where they were slaughtered. None of these curses were made lightly. Each one has a reason.’ Bo does not care, declaring ‘You have no right to be judge and jury.’ She destroys the rest of his nails, and in doing so, his role in his community. Bo’s point of view prevails with little regard for Tshombe’s culture, and her oppositional stance toward Fae society means she is able to ‘feign resistance and progress while maintaining the need for conformity and belonging’. (Zisman Newman 2020: 148)

Feminism and Fairy Tales

Bo’s challenge to Fae hegemony is often hindered by the Fae world and its rules. Many aspects of Fae society are ‘organized according to principles that differ from ordinary life’ and in figuring them out Bo learns more not only about the Fae, but also about herself. (Warner 2014: 5) Lost Girl uses fairy tales for self-discovery and critical reflection, tapping into the genre’s ‘hope that we can change ourselves while changing the world’. (Zipes 2012: 20) For instance, in ‘SubterrFaenean’ Bo investigates reports of sewer alligators, and finds a group of Fae consigned to live underground. Their leader Atticus tells Bo that decades ago this group of Fae were deliberately infected with an illness and quarantined; they have been trapped underneath the city and forced to feed on its homeless and transient population ever since. One of the city’s urban planners—and a Pied Piper Fae—has tweaked zoning ordinances to keep them hidden, in order to cover up the truth that he had them forcibly removed from their homes so that he could sell the development rights to their high-value land. Upholding the ‘generic preoccupation with cruelty, deceit, violence, murder, and perversions of sex and power shared by the fairy-tale and crime genres,’ Bo pits her succubus sex appeal against the Pied Piper in order to bring his machinations to light. (Bullen & Sawers 2017: 30) Determined to make a difference, Bo is even willing to champion a member of the Fae as part of her campaign for a more equitable Fae society.

Fae are not the only ones who can pre-empt or prompt change. Kenzi learns that ‘fairy tales often dramatically take [someone] from average person to extraordinary hero’. (Tresca 2014: 73) During a drunken girls’ night in ‘Mirror, Mirror’ Kenzi jokes that Bo can recover from her break-up with Dyson by summoning Baba Yaga. A character from Kenzi’s childhood, Baba Yaga is a powerful witch who helps women take revenge on the lovers who have spurned them, for ‘[i]t is in the other moral world of fairy tales that women tend to find an iota of justice’. (Zipes 2012: 80) The next day Dyson finds himself beset by hordes of angry women and Kenzi is incredulous: ‘When I found out about the Fae, I knew that had to mean that Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster and Little Miss Piggy all existed, but Baba Yaga can’t, she just can’t!’ Determined to reverse the curse, Kenzi is instead pulled into the witch’s realm, one of many captives. Kenzi shatters Baba Yaga’s enchanted mirror, the only way out, and gives all the pieces to the other young women trapped there, enabling their escape. This ‘journey to Baba Yaga’s realm represents a transforming moment’ and her selfless act ‘establishes [her] as a hero, fitting in among a company of much more powerful individuals’. (Tresca 2014: 73) Like Bo, Kenzi is learning the rules of the Fae world and who she is there.

Both women eventually acclimatise to Fae society, and Bo’s seemingly implausible cases turn into their new normal. This is emphasised by Bo’s experiences during The Dawning, a Fae coming-of-age ritual. The ritual forces Bo to imagine a world in which she and Dyson are white-collar working professionals, married and expecting their first child. (‘The Ceremony’)  Bo must put an end to this vision of domestic bliss order to successfully complete the trial and become a full member of Fae society. Lost Girl uses ‘fairy-tale intertexts … as subversive strategies to contest the idealised outcomes of fairy tales and their representations of gender and female identity,’ and Bo’s rejection of a conventional and comfortable life amplifies the rebellious resonance of her crime fighting. (Haase 2000: 32)

Crime and the Action Heroine

Marina Warner contends that such strategies are key to folklore and fairy tales’ cultural significance. (2014)  As ‘laboratories for experiments with thought, allegories of alternatives to the world we know,’ these stories ask us to imagine the world differently. (Warner 2014: 5; see also Greenhill & Rudy 2014; Zipes 2012) For Lost Girl, this means re-imagining the role of women in the action genre, ‘often seen as the most ‘Neanderthal,’ the most irredeemably macho of Hollywood products’. (Tasker 1993: 242) In the past, the genre has typically relegated women to supporting roles: sexy enough to remind us that the heroes are heterosexual, but not so central that they detract from the action. (Brown 1993; Fuchs 1993; Jeffords 1994) Bo, however, is what Jeffrey Brown (2011; 2015) calls an action heroine: ‘a tough, self-reliant, and sexy adventuress’. (2011: 5; see also Mizejewski 2004; Schubart 2007) Or, as Light Fae leader Lachlan snidely explains: ‘Seductress. Warrior. Fashion refugee’. (‘Scream a Little Dream’) While Lachlan may not appreciate Bo’s wardrobe, comprised almost entirely of skin-tight leather pants, cleavage-baring corset tops, and knee-high heeled boots, the ‘leather- (and spandex-) wearing action heroine clearly symbolises her transgressive nature as a tough, hard, active female figure’. (Brown 2011: 187) Bo’s softcore dominatrix aesthetic is a nod to both her sexually charged succubus nature and the wardrobe of other pop culture action heroines such as Xena, Barb Wire, and Sydney Bristow. These action heroines challenge conventional representations of heroism as a male and masculine endeavour, and such ‘[f]undamental changes such as the gender of the lead characters indicates a twist in how the entire genre speaks to social needs and fantasies’. (Brown 2011: 10)

Popular feminism is one of these social fantasies. It generates an appetite for media representations in which ‘heroines have adventures, a commitment to justice, and a license to do what’s usually done by men’. (Mizejewski 2004: 4; see also Gates 2006 & 2011; Walton & Jones 1999) In ‘Dead Lucky’ Bo and Kenzi are investigating an underground gambling den run by a Fae named Jesper Salming. Bo flirtatiously admires Jesper’s art collection and tries to sweet-talk information out of him with her succubus powers. Jesper isn’t fooled and reveals himself to be a hrimthurs—a frost giant—when his fingers change to icicles that he plunges into her chest. While Kenzi distracts him with a crowbar across the head, Bo kicks him across the room where he is impaled on one of his vintage art pieces. Bo rarely shies away from violence, and throughout the series she fights with a wide range of weapons, from swords and staves, to guns, baseball bats, and even a machete. Violence is so integral to Bo’s everyday life that on her birthday her friends give her nothing but weapons: a knife from Dyson, shurikens from Lauren, and a vintage walking stick with a sword hidden inside from Trick. (‘Masks’)

Bo’s willing embrace of violence illustrates ‘how gender is perceived through the lens of a specific narrative iconography’. (Brown 2011: 10; see also Deffenbacher 2016) Her work often weaponises the hallmarks of stereotypical femininity. For example, when preparing to face off against a more powerful Fae, Bo boasts: ‘I’m gonna force-feed Lachlan a buffet of right-hand burritos and stiletto-boot tacos’. (‘Barometz. Trick. Pressure.’) Such moments demonstrate that the action heroine’s cultural work includes repurposing already-established perceptions of femininity and violence to present ‘the woman investigator as sexy fun’. (Mizejewski 2004: 165) Bo’s everyday crime-fighting experiences reflect this; Kenzi quips: ‘You know why I love working with you? The glamour. I mean, who else gets to chase down a gun-wielding street artist and make out with a perverted cyclops? No one!’. (‘It’s Better to Burn Out Than Fae Away’) Lost Girl also revises the trope of embedding a female figure in a predominantly male team as a means of ‘including women but also tempering any threat they may pose to the ideal of manly heroism’. (Brown 2015: 54-55) Instead, the folklore-enhanced world operates as if our understandings of gender, genre, and heroism are already more expansive by establishing a deep roster of action heroines both Fae and human. There are, for instance, valkyrie, who find and ferry the souls of great warriors to Valhalla. Notably, Acacia (who appears in a handful of episodes as a valkyrie mentor) is played by Linda Hamilton, widely known for her role as Sarah Connor in the Terminator franchise—a key figure in the trajectory of action heroines in pop culture, and an important intertextual reference. (Schubart 2007 & Tasker 1993) In season two Dyson is reunited with his old friend Ciara who, as a scuffock, is both a warrior and a teacher, training others to fight as skilfully as she does. She also runs her late husband’s security company and its teams of mercenaries. These lucrative endeavors have made her one of the youngest women billionaires across both Fae and human society. For the first four seasons The Morrigan — the head of the Dark Fae — is Evony, renowned (and often reviled) for her complex, crafty plans and unapologetically vengeful leadership style. Lauren, the Light Fae’s indentured human doctor and Bo’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, is a brilliant scientist. Her experiments keep diverse Light Fae species healthy and also advance science itself, netting her a prestigious award for scientific achievement. In Lauren’s hands knowledge becomes a weapon, demonstrating that action and heroism are not limited to the physical or the magical.

Lost Girl’s mostly female heroines thus intervene in the ways in which crime and action narratives often incorporate women, suggesting a ‘negotiation of human gender categories with other possibilities for identity and culture’. (Deffenbacher 2016: 36) This is reinforced by the fifth-season appearance of The Ancients Zeus and Hera, extremely powerful Fae that humans think of as gods. Zeus manifests in a female body and Hera a male one, inverting a convention Zeus explains is merely cultural: ‘Just like a patriarchal society to depict its most powerful member as male. I’ve had many forms, but currently Zee is a she’. (‘End of Faes’) Zeus’ word choice—’many forms’—significantly suggests that the binary of male/female endemic in human understandings of gender is also limited. The Ancients’ embodiment is another way Lost Girl calls upon the imaginative flexibility of folklore and fairy tales to expand the repertoire of images commonly available in action narratives for imagining female power. The third Ancient, Iris, appears as a young Black woman and while the Iris of Greek mythology is usually known as a messenger for the gods, Lost Girl’s Iris is also the vessel for Nyx, a primeval goddess so powerful even Zeus feared her. Yet in Lost Girl this fear manifests in the need to keep Nyx contained, and so Iris is forced to wear a magical bracelet that nullifies most of her abilities. While potentially exciting to see young Black womanhood equated with world-changing power, the series most often presents Iris shackled by White adults, underscoring what Brown notes about the intersectional politics of the action heroine trend: ‘Given the importance that strong cinematic women of colour have had in creating and popularising action heroines it is somewhat surprising how predominantly white the current wave of heroines is’. (2015: 78)

Sex and Sexualities in Fae-dom

In addition to forwarding images of (White) women as action-oriented, Lost Girl also showcases sexualities beyond the heteronormative. Folklore and fairy tales have the capacity to ‘speak of ‘unheard’ things that cannot be spoken of in other ways openly,’ and the Fae embrace all sorts of sexual proclivities and activities. (Warner 2014: 11) Bo is bisexual and polyamorous, and her succubus nature means she has a voracious libido: she feeds off sexual energy, something most easily acquired through enthusiastic intercourse with partners of any sort, in any number and combination. Many episodes’ crime-solving sequences feature a vignette of Kenzi waiting impatiently for Bo to wrap up a sexual encounter, since Bo can also use this sexual energy (or chi) to bounce back from injuries—what Kenzi calls getting ‘bang-healed’. (‘Raging Fae’) The effect is particularly pronounced when Bo feeds off another Fae, so she and Dyson set terms for a sex-only arrangement that Bo relies on in times of grave injury or to super-charge her skills in anticipation of a gruelling night on the city’s mean streets. Lost Girl focuses on Bo’s sexual agency, emphasising how she initiates and steers their encounters as well as the pleasure she takes in them. For instance, ‘Turn to Stone’ opens on Bo and Dyson sparring in a boxing ring. Bo backs Dyson up to the ropes and slides her hand down his pants to grip his erection. The camera follows Dyson’s body as she directs his actions, cutting between his mouth on her breasts or his hand between her legs and her face, to emphasise how she asks for and experiences sexual gratification.

Lost Girl is equally attentive to the intimacy of Bo’s same-sex encounters, cognizant of how ‘the [fairy tale] genre not only represents sexuality … but also plays a crucial role in defining these representations as normal’. (Seifert 2015: 15; Kuykendal & Sturm 2007) This is especially apparent when she and human Lauren try to navigate an exclusive sexual and romantic relationship. For example, ‘Fae-de to Black’ begins with Bo and Lauren in bed together, with close-ups on their writhing, intertwined legs; on a tongue slowly trailing down a sleek and sweaty stomach; on hands tangled in hair and heads thrown back in breathless pleasure. This episode also highlights the challenges of monogamy for their relationship: Lauren is exhausted from trying to keep up with Bo’s sex drive, and Bo is dangerously malnourished from deriving all of her chi from a single human source. They agree to open up their relationship to additional sex partners, and in ‘Faes Wide Shut’ they cruise their local bar together for a suitable third for the evening. Polyamory is part of Bo’s identity; as Dyson explains: ‘there’s always going to be other people. It’s in her nature’. (‘Here Comes the Night’)

The events of ‘Fae-nted Love’ make this clear. After a few weeks of casually dating a Fae named Ryan, Bo inadvertently bleeds on him during a ‘bang-healing’ session and activates her previously unknown ability to hold someone in thrall. Ryan becomes besotted and unwilling to leave, a clear change in his behaviour that makes Bo uncomfortable: ‘You’re the one who told me post-orgasm claustrophobia was a medical condition … what I want is for you to go.’ Just as he begins showering her with expensive gifts, she runs afoul of an addonc: a manipulative water Fae who can wipe people’s memories, after which they imprint on the first friendly person they find. This turns out to be Ryan, who takes advantage of Bo’s confusion to convince her that they are engaged—a binding ceremony for Fae, who treat the formal commitment with reverence and do not permit its dissolution for at least one thousand years. Even with the Addonc’s curse Bo’s nature asserts itself, and she hits on the saleswoman helping her select a wedding dress. Luckily Kenzi and Trick are able to find Bo and break the spells on both her and Ryan, and Bo’s full self-identity is restored, demonstrating that there is ‘nothing inevitable about the link between the fairy tale and heteronormativity’. (Seifert 2015: 18) Her sexuality is so central to her understanding of who she is that when her sex drive evaporates in ‘Big in Japan’ Bo struggles to find herself again. ‘You’re okay,’ she tells herself in the mirror. ‘Everything is okay. You’re strong. You’re smart. You’re sexy.’ Sex is a cornerstone of Bo’s well-being, another way in which Lost Girl’s mythical and magical storyworld encourages us to ‘think divergently [and] also be self-reflexive about the socially constructed dimensions of experience’. (Saler 2012: 19) Lost Girl asks audiences to reimagine the role an active sex life can play in women’s physical and mental health as well normalising myriad configurations of romantic and sexual partnerships.

The Magic of Individual Achievement

Yet, as Brown cautions, ‘[t]o understand [action heroines] as simply either good and empowering or as bad and disempowering, is to miss the complex range of issues their currently popularity raises’. (Brown 2011: 9) Bo’s own story—a Fae foundling raised by humans, who discovers her true nature years later and rejects Fae factions in favour of her own independence—reflects popular feminism’s neoliberal ‘belief in the primacy of individualism and the power of personal choice’. (Brown 2015: 169) As part of this entrepreneurial self-investment, Bo promotes herself as the unaligned succubus, drawing heavily on the notions of freedom and choice commonly associated with feminism in the popular imagination. Eva Chen points out, ‘[w]hile these terms suggest a feminist legacy, they are used not to advance the feminist cause, but to celebrate a rhetoric of individual choice and freedom’. (2013: 444) Bo’s self-declared sovereignty seem to mark her as an empowered figure—’Norma Fae’, as the Dark Fae leader sardonically says. (‘It’s a Fae, Fae, Fae, Fae World’) Bo shows that the conventions of Fae society can be challenged by a sufficiently motivated individual, however no one—not even Bo herself—follows through to work for a more widespread social transformation. In keeping with the rhetorics of popular feminism, it is enough that Bo is seen resisting, and ‘[t]his struggle to become at once visible and resistant is especially relevant to popular television feminisms of the current moment’. (Perkins & Schreiber 2019: 921; see also Banet-Weiser 2018) Catherine Rottenburg situates these strategies within neoliberal feminism, which ‘must not only be understood as helping to shape women’s desires, aspirations, and behaviour, but also … as producing a feminist subject informed through and through by a cost-benefit calculus’. (2018: 14) Being the unaligned succubus is Bo’s brand identity: it is how she carves out a space in Fae society, and also how she markets herself to potential clients by occupying a position that is neither Light nor Dark but still Fae. Tellingly, she describes opening a private investigation business as a ‘grand plan to commodify my freakhood;’ she invests in it physically (training her succubus and her street-fighting skills), as well as emotionally (seeking out more information about the Fae and her own history), in the hopes that it will ‘pay off’ by bringing to light the truth of her birth and parentage. (‘Oh Kappa, My Kappa’)

As the series continues, Bo mobilises this language of individualism and self-determination in response to indications that she is the subject of Fae prophecy. When the Nain Rouge, self-described as ‘the Harbinger of Doom, a messenger of disaster’ appears to tell Bo that an old evil has resurfaced and Bo is the Fae’s only hope for survival, Bo is skeptical and claims ‘I don’t do destiny. Just like I don’t do picking sides’. (‘Original Skin’) These decisions are presented as a form of agency, a way for Bo to challenge Fae norms and stay true to herself. A closer look at what Bo is resisting, however, raises the possibility that Bo’s focus on ‘individual gratification has threatened to replace the feminist politics of collective emancipation’. (Chen 2013: 444) Few members of Fae society share her aversion to the clan system that insists each Fae must choose between Light or Dark, for Fae history shows that clan divisions have been beneficial for all Fae. Before their implementation, the Fae were trapped in a seemingly endless civil war between multiple Fae clans which slowly claimed millions of lives. The Blood King—who can use his blood as ink to script someone’s life story—wrote about the Fae’s future as a truce between two sides. With the truce a centuries-old reality, Bo finds that most Fae are reluctant to rise up for fear of returning to the cycle of violence and vengeance that defined their past. Bo sees something sinister in this dedication to a community-oriented structure, and repeatedly rejects collectivist politics in statements like ‘I’ve gone this long without playing by anyone’s rules, and I’m not going to start now’. (‘Midnight Lamp’) The series thus sets up an ‘ideological chasm between a myopic focus on the self and the belief in collective agency’. (Brown 2015: 178)

The Fae aren’t entirely immune to popular feminism’s persuasive rhetoric of individual action and achievement. In ‘Truth and Consequences’ we meet the Glaive, who makes and maintains the laws that keep the peace between Light and Dark. Presiding over a networking event for Fae women, the Glaive asserts: ‘Unlike our human counterparts, Fae women have held positions of power and importance for centuries. From fierce warriors like the Celtic fairy queens to wise scholars like the Druids, we historically have been treated as equals. In order to continue that in today’s world we must always reach for greatness and ascend to the highest pinnacles.’ The Glaive’s speech features a ‘mobilization of affective terms’ common to popular and neoliberal feminism. (Rottenberg 2018: 40) ‘Reaching for greatness’ and ‘ascending to the highest pinnacles’ are instructions aimed at reshaping individual attitudes and affective orientations; the language resonates emotionally but lacks a concrete identification of what Fae women face ‘in today’s world’ and so cannot offer any steps for making substantive changes. Unsurprisingly, the Glaive’s feel-good advice, ‘framed as an individual choice: they just need to believe it, and then they will become it,’ is met with rapturous applause. (Banet-Weiser 2018: 30)

A similarly individualistic tone pervades ‘Adventures in Fae-by Sitting,’ in which Bo infiltrates a suspicious suburban book club only to discover that it is actually a coven of women using the dark arts to solve their problems. Its leader Caroline explains: ‘We are just using what the universe gave us to rid ourselves of the negative forces in our lives.’ Her friend Susan gushes ‘We’re going to have so much fun together! This shit is a blast!’ Bo is less enthusiastic, since her investigations so far link these women to a series of deaths and disappearances in their gated community. Yet Caroline insists ‘This is not about vengeance! This is about strong women understanding their worth and taking back the power in our lives.’ This pep talk taps into a discursive pattern Banet-Weiser identifies as crucial to popular feminism’s narratives of female achievement: a ‘dual dynamic of injury and capacity [in which] women respond to the injuries caused by centuries of being undervalued as citizens … [and] seek to demonstrate individual capacity as a way to suture this wound’. (2018: 45) The coven has been targeting men who have treated them poorly because they are women, like the sexist mechanic who deliberately overcharges them. By turning to magic to eliminate specific problematic people, they start to see themselves as confident and capable women. While the Glaive, as well as Caroline and her coven, are revealed as villains because of their individualistic appropriation of Fae power, Bo demonstrates a more substantive wounding than expensive car repairs. Raised in a rural community by a conservative family unaware of her Fae heritage, Bo was subject to years of physical and emotional abuse as she tried to manage succubus puberty in a devoutly religious home. Bo’s past trauma legitimises her use of her powers today, reinforcing a trope for media heroines in which ‘[a]buse, control, abandonment, and manipulation are consistently positioned as an inevitable gendered reality, but even more troubling, they are positioned as realities that we (women) benefit from’. (Zisman Newman 2020: 155; see also Oliver 2016) Lost Girl sets up, and continually returns to, a trajectory of obstacles overcome and destiny re-designed into a life of Bo’s choosing—a word that taps into broader sentiments of female freedom and capacity that have become familiar stand-ins for feminist politics in pop culture.

Conclusion

The program’s opening credits, unchanged throughout all five seasons, remind viewers of these themes every episode. In them Bo explains via voice-over: ‘Life is hard when you don’t know who you are It’s even harder when you don’t know what you are. My love carries a death sentence. I was lost for years. Searching while hiding, only to find that I belong to a world hidden from humans. I won’t hide anymore. I will live the life I choose.’ By the end of her monologue, Bo is striding down the street with Kenzi, smiling and happy. The credits encourage us to think of Bo as an empowered protagonist; her voice-over makes it clear that she is in charge of her own narrative, which she presents as a series of challenges culminating in a new sense of personal agency that is confirmed by her ability to make her own choices. Lost Girl thus consistently mobilises common tactics in contemporary media to represent and talk about women, ones frequently connected to popular feminism and neoliberal feminism. (Banet-Weiser, Gill, & Rottenberg 2019) These tactics emphasise individual achievement, often framing systemic issues as solely personal challenges or failings. The increasing prominence of such narratives reiterates a form of feminism that is about individual action and satisfaction instead of collective, intersectional agitation. Bo’s resistance to the norms of Fae society make things better mostly just for Bo; Fae hegemony persists, and Bo eventually leaves being a private eye behind to investigate instead her unknown history. At the same time, Lost Girl offers its audience a set of characters and narratives that deliberately work against familiar forms of gender, sexuality, and heroism. Fairy tales and folklore are important frameworks for scripting this story world differently, and for encouraging viewers to believe in these differences, even if only briefly. Such representations are important for—and to—feminism. By declaring ‘feminist’ to be a positive identifier and expanding the places in which these figures can be found, programs like Lost Girl create opportunities for engaging with feminism’s shifting social and political meanings.