Women and Star Wars
May. 18th, 2011 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anghraineIt occurred to me that my paper on (*gasp*) women and Star Wars might be of slightly more interest to ... some of ... you all than to my professor or class, since it's basically ... feminist meta in APA format. Only formal and super-long (so, er, also known as an academic essay).
I'm trying to think if there's anything to warn for - um, it's fairly negative about the prequels, I guess, and feminism + Star Wars isn't really a pretty sight at all, but I can't imagine those are a surprise at this point. So ... here it is.
Women and Star Wars
Since the Star Wars series’ debut in 1977, it has successfully appealed to both mainstream audiences and its own fanbase, earning billions of dollars in box office revenue alone. The six movies are among the most visible artifacts of geek culture, setting precedents for the filmmaking industry as a whole, while its characters and settings have become instantly recognizable icons in popular as well as niche media. Thus, the series’ portrayal of women both reflects the attitudes of the culture that has produced it, and influences those attitudes.
The films have been progressive in a number of ways. The Star Wars galaxy is heavily male-dominated (if somewhat less so in recent years), but the female characters that do appear are presented as every bit as competent as their male counterparts. In The Phantom Menace, for instance, the fourteen-year-old Queen Amidala creates a plan to liberate her planet, and not only does her plan succeed, but she personally takes over the capital.
Even when she appears defeated, as when she is captured earlier in the film, she remains capable and resourceful. The “queen” who is captured isn’t Amidala at all, but a look-alike handmaiden. The real queen is concealed as the decoy queen’s handmaiden, Padmé. Even at her weakest, it turns out that she always held the upper hand.
When female characters don’t succeed, or betray personal weaknesses - and the two most central ones, Padmé and Leia, are well-realized enough that they do both - these failings are almost never chalked up to their gender. Early in the first film, Han Solo does ascribe their near-demise to Leia’s femininity, but the comment seems to reflect more on his sexism than on Leia’s capabilities; Han has no advice of his own, and Leia promptly (and capably) takes over her own rescue.
In fact, women in Star Wars generally take active roles in their lives. Padmé and Leia are influential politicians. They choose their allegiances, they’re prepared to fight for them, and they actually do so when the time comes. The cast is rounded out by Beru Lars, quietly but firmly opposing her husband’s intolerance of their nephew’s ambitions; a number of female knights and Rebels; Shmi Skywalker, who exercises as much agency as can be reasonably expected of a slave; at least two more ruling queens; and Mon Mothma, former Imperial Senator and leader of the Rebellion.
The movies also step away from damaging female stereotypes. The Madonna-whore complex is nowhere to be seen in any of the films, from 1977 to 2005. Leia, the first female character to appear in the series, simultaneously carries on two separate relationships with two different men - one an affectionate camaraderie borne out of affinity and mutual understanding, the other a sexually-charged, quasi-antagonistic cooperation. The three of them are one another’s best friends.
Contrary to what one might expect, however, Leia is never dismissed as “slutty” or “wishy-washy,” whether she’s declaring her love to Han or kissing Luke - within the space of a few minutes. There is no suggestion from either the characters or the narrative that one of her relationships should exclude the other, even before the revelation that she and Luke are twins.
At the same time, however, Leia is very far from a Madonna figure. She can be somewhat maternal towards her brother, when they’re not busy slaughtering their enemies, but is otherwise abrasive, impatient, and fierce. She displays almost no tolerance for weakness in herself or in others, resembling no one so much as her formidable father, Darth Vader, and betraying little similarity to either the generic mother figure or her own mother, the sensitive, diplomatic Padmé Amidala.
Padmé, nevertheless, also transcends damaging stereotypes. While the character’s arc is dominated by her inevitable maternity (and death), she is not primarily identified as a mother and never seems to define herself as one. In fact, the whole dynamic of the Skywalker family defies the tradition of protective fatherhood and sacrificial motherhood.
Sacrificial motherhood is the familiar idea that “no matter what, the woman must give up anything and everything for herself so that her child will have a better life” (Basinger, 1993, p. 426). A mother’s role is to sacrifice whatever is necessary for her children, whether it’s an enjoyable job or her life; a father’s is to protect his children from harm. As the most central parents in the entire saga, one would expect the highly gender-typical Anakin and Padmé to do the same.
However, nothing of the kind happens. Their children are concealed from Anakin/Vader out of the (mistaken, though somewhat justified) expectation that he would have no interest in protecting them from harm, and is in fact himself the primary danger to them. When he discovers his son’s existence, it only takes two brief interactions for Anakin to sacrifice his life for him.
Padmé, on the other hand, does nothing of the kind. The narrative goes to somewhat ludicrous lengths to insist that Padmé’s death is completely unrelated to her motherhood, even though she has just given birth to premature twins after having been strangled into unconsciousness. Padmé’s arc ending with her death by despair is certainly problematic enough. However, it clearly avoids the tradition of mothers sacrificing everything they are for their children.
Luke and Leia are intensely vulnerable newborn infants, with a death sentence over their heads, and the last hope for the galaxy she loves; if any children need their mother, they do. However, Padmé can’t give up her own needs for theirs. They can’t give meaning to her life, or grant her the will to live. Instead, she apparently wills (or un-wills) herself to death, her last thoughts wholly unconnected to their children; Anakin’s last words are about Leia.
Leia herself must be the focal point of any consideration of the portrayal of women in Star Wars. She’s by far the most central female character in the series, and one of the most central characters, period. Thirty-four years after her first appearance, she remains an icon of female authority and resourcefulness.
To understand the weight of her character, it’s important to go all the way back to the very beginning. The opening crawl of the first movie (and each one thereafter) began: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It’s the traditional opening of a fairy-tale, transposed into space, just as A New Hope is itself a fairy-tale transposed into space.
A kind-hearted boy living in dissatisfying obscurity, who discovers his legacy of heroism and power? A wise old wizard who mentors him? A cynical, wise-cracking sidekick? A quest to rescue a damsel in distress? A New Hope reads like a checklist of just about every fairy-tale or heroic fantasy in existence, right down to the princess locked in a tower.
Then we actually meet the princess. Leia doesn’t trail after them like a good little prize; she questions their authority and competence. She refuses to put up with Han’s explicit, hostile sexism, but she doesn’t have much time for Luke’s benevolent sexism either. She adapts their rough plan, defends herself against attackers, and takes over her own rescue. She’s the only one to realize that their escape is actually a trap, and as a military leader incorporates that knowledge into their strategy. Instead of becoming a hero’s reward, this princess gives their reward (medals) to them; that is, she becomes the acting subject, not the object.
The hints that we’re about to see something different from the traditional fairy-tale princess are there from the beginning. Leia precipitates the whole plot, stealing the secret plans and sending them to a friend of her family. Not only that, but the narrative continues to follow her throughout the movie; the original trilogy generally consists of two related, but independent storylines which periodically meet up. Leia is the focus of the first, Luke of the second, and they get about equal screen-time regardless of whether they’re together or not.
Where Han is a sidekick, whose storyline is only relevant insofar as it relates to Luke or Leia, and who is almost only ever seen in conjunction with one of them, Leia herself is closer to a deuteragonist. In overall narrative importance, she’s second to only Luke himself, and never defined by him.
In fact, Leia isn’t defined by anyone except herself. She’s never defined as Han’s love interest, for example; if anything, he’s hers. She’s not reduced to Luke’s sister, either. The fact that they’re siblings at all is only discovered in a last-minute reveal in the third movie, which is promptly followed by splitting their storylines again, following each of them separately and (again) devoting about equal time to her. Neither is she identified as Darth Vader’s daughter: though he must be her father, and though striking similarities subsist between them, the connection is kept firmly on the periphery of her identity.
As mentioned above, Leia rejects objectification. Initially, she refuses to be the hero’s beautiful, vacant reward, but it goes well beyond that. In what is unfortunately her most famous scene, Leia is captured by Jabba the Hutt, an evil criminal mastermind. He forces her to wear a skimpy metal bikini, and keeps her under his control by attaching a chain to a collar at her neck.
Ubiquitous as the costume has become, Leia never wears it by choice, but is forced to become a sexual object for his pleasure. She frees herself at the earliest opportunity, choking him to death with the chain: that is, she frees herself with her own chains, in an unsubtle but powerful rejection of patriarchal control. She spends the rest of her time in the clothing that she prefers (princess gowns and practical pantsuits, depending on the occasion).
If this were all, Leia would be a largely unambiguous exemplar of female strength. Unfortunately, it’s not; powerful and promising though she may be, Leia’s characterization is deeply problematic in other areas.
The last image in Revenge of the Sith is of the Skywalker twins. The infant Leia is concealed in plain sight, adopted by one of their mother’s allies and friends; Luke is hidden on remote Tatooine. She grows up in the heart of the Empire, safely anonymous, while Luke lives under their father’s name, with their father’s relatives, on their father’s home planet. Obi-Wan Kenobi personally oversees this separation.
We are never told why they must be separated, or why Luke alone receives the brunt of their father’s legacy. Luke and Leia are twins with, in this less than scientific universe, presumably equal capacities: they are both naturally gifted pilots, they are both highly sensitive to the Force (the wizardry-cum-deity that governs the universe), and they are both their father’s children. Yet nobody shows the slightest interest in training Leia – only Luke.
In fact, Obi-Wan, who held Leia in his arms when she was born, appears to have entirely forgotten about her existence in The Empire Strikes Back. He, the Jedi who has transcended mortality, unequivocally announces that Luke is the galaxy’s last hope. Leia is apparently of little worth to him; it’s the alive and mortal Yoda who has to remind him that, actually, Leia might be worth educating after all. But only if Luke fails; in the event, he succeeds, so she’s never taught at all. Leia intuitively uses the Force to ascertain that Luke has survived, and that’s the end of it.
The parallels to liberal feminism’s long fight for “education for girls and women equal to that offered boys and men” (Wendell, 1987, p. 66) is, unfortunately, quite clear. As late as 1983, we are still seeing a woman, brilliant and talented in her own right, refused the educational opportunities that would allow her the same opportunities as her brother.
Even their father, who recognizes her potential (for galactic domination!) the moment that he’s made aware of her existence, regards her as distinctly secondary to Luke. If Luke won’t turn to evil, Vader will be forced to corrupt Leia. If Luke does turn to evil, Obi-Wan will be forced to train Leia. Whatever their other differences, the two men are clearly defining her as little more than a second-best alternative to her brother. Moreover, between the two of them, Leia is placed in an impossible bind – no matter which one of them triumphs, Leia is confined to the position of a less-worthy protégée to someone, or never being trained at all.
Leia is also effectively depowered over the course of the original trilogy. It’s easy to point at the quasi-objectification with the metal bikini, but something perhaps more significant happens to her in Return of the Jedi. She loses her power – not her power as a female character, but the very real political power she possessed in the first two movies.
In almost her first line, Leia announces herself a member of the Imperial Senate. She is also an ambassador, spy, and heir to authority over a planet. Even after Alderaan is destroyed, her leadership authority is respected by just about everyone – Leia included.
Upon first meeting Han, she informs him that he will obey her orders. He feels compelled to first trivialize and then sexualize her authority, but in actuality he does quickly follow her lead. When they return to the Rebellion, Leia is promptly greeted as an equal by the military leadership, though she has no official position herself, and she certainly considers herself the equal to anyone. She joins the other Rebellion leaders to plan their assault on the Death Star in A New Hope, and personally delivers orders to the troops in The Empire Strikes Back.
From that moment on, however, her authority diminishes. In Cloud City, she is greeted with a smarmy “what have we here?” She simply introduces herself by her given name. Han, apparently moving from his initial hostile sexism to a gentler paternalism, leaves her under the protection of his best friend, the hairy, towering and of course male Chewbacca. She retains some power in the relationship, strangling Lando by proxy and controlling the ship, but the next time we see her, even this much will be gone.
In Return of the Jedi, Leia has apparently left the Rebellion entirely to go after Han. Her earlier positions of power have gone either to men, or to extremely minor female characters who speak once and are never seen again. Luke has done the same thing, but simply remains outside the Rebellion’s command structure, leaving and returning as the whim takes him; he answers to no one. Leia, on the other hand, becomes a foot soldier under Han’s command and then, worse still, the pampered prisoner of a tribe of overgrown teddy bears.
She has likewise become less important narratively. While the narrative does (as mentioned before) continue to follow her, she does nothing that any other soldier couldn’t do equally well. In the few scenes that are specifically about her, when her father and brother fight over her fate, Leia isn’t even present. She doesn’t need to be; it’s not about her, it’s about how she influences their actions. By the end, Leia only matters insofar as she relates to her male relations.
Neither are all the problematic elements, from a liberal feminist viewpoint, focused on Leia alone. Almost every single character in the original trilogy is male; the few exceptions are relegated firmly to the background.
The prequel trilogy offers little improvement. There is more female representation, certainly; more background figures and minor characters are female, but as far as the main cast goes, this is very much a man’s galaxy. Leia and Padmé are unavoidably representative because they are the only women of any significance whatsoever. Ultimately, Star Wars offers three roles to women: irrelevant eye candy, political figures and their decoys, and dead mothers.
Apart from Leia, the four most important female characters are all maternal figures: Beru Lars, Luke Skywalker’s (dead) aunt; Breha Organa, Leia’s (dead) adoptive mother; Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker’s (dead) mother; and Padmé Amidala, Luke and Leia’s (dead) natural mother. Each woman’s significance to the plot comes from her motherhood, her character arc is dominated by it, and, of course, each of them is doomed to die.
Beru, for instance, only briefly appears as the supportive aunt to Owen’s gruff uncle. They’re promptly killed by stormtroopers, and largely exist to motivate Luke’s decision to become a Jedi. Breha appears in one scene and looks motherly; if she isn’t already dead by the original trilogy’s timeline, she gets blown up with Alderaan. Shmi disappears early in the prequel trilogy; she’s later tortured to death, dying in Anakin’s arms and triggering his first step towards the Dark Side. Padmé’s imminent death triggers his final step, and she then commits suicide with her mind.
Overall, none of them are important in their own right. They matter in how they affect the men around them. In Star Wars, a woman’s significance is, as Budd Boetticher puts it, in “what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance” (Mulvey, 1990, p. 33).
This puts Star Wars in a very long, very damaging tradition of subordinating not just particular women to particular men, but the female to the male – valuing women only in their relationship to men, or their appeal to men. Unfortunately, Star Wars succumbs to the latter, too – the male gaze is very strong with this one.
The male gaze is, as Schultz summarizes, the way in which women are “displayed for rapt contemplation [. . .] scattered like parks or resorts, little retreats for the male imagination, strokes to the ego and hooks for commerce” (1995, p. 369). Laura Mulvey’s original, groundbreaking essay describes the different directions the male gaze can travel. Star Wars is a major offender in every respect.
First, the male gaze exists within stories themselves; that is, a female character is the object of a male character’s gaze. Jabba ogles Leia in the metal bikini, registering her only as a vehicle for his own gratification. Secondly, the female character is the object of the presumably male, heterosexual audience’s gaze. Male fans have likewise ogled Leia, to the point that her entire character is overshadowed by that single sequence. In a slightly more complex variation, the audience can also identify with the male character looking at the female character; the male character becomes the vehicle through which the female character is objectified by the presumed audience.
This latter point is, I think, a crucial one. Earlier, I described how it is Jabba, not Leia, who is responsible for the objectification in respect to the bikini. However, it’s important to consider that this is a story and film: that it is constructed. Jabba is not real. Princess Leia is not real. The screenwriter who constructed a plot point around objectifying her is, however, real. Carrie Fisher, forced to lose enough weight to appeal to the presumed audience, is real. While the sequence is complicated by Leia’s rejection of the role, ultimately Jabba is nothing more than an excuse to titillate the audience at the expense of a powerful female voice, to silence her. As Fisher puts it, “When Princess Leia loses her clothes, she loses her ability to speak” (2008, p. 152).
Nor is this the only time that plot points are invented to draw male gazes to the female characters. Padmé, almost as notoriously, spends her only battle scene in Attack of the Clones wearing a skintight white suit. Early on, it’s conveniently ripped by an alien monster, revealing her back and midriff for the entirety of the sequence.
These sorts of transparent plot devices may seem harmless enough, but they are very specifically gendered. Apart from a brief shirtless scene, there is no equivalent titillation for female viewers. This is about men gazing at women who, by nature of the medium, can never gaze back, reducing them to little more than bodies.
Women’s to-be-looked-at-ness is emphasized by costuming. Many of the male characters wear the same outfit every time they appear, or very similar ones. Obi-Wan Kenobi, for instance, appears to have worn the same set of robes over the course of some thirty years. Anakin Skywalker alternates between customized black Jedi robes and his customized black suit as Darth Vader. Male characters’ clothes are generally utilitarian and often uniform across the profession they belong to.
Of course, we see nothing of the kind with women. Even setting Leia aside, her mother Padmé’s clothes are practically eye-candy in their own right, rich, elaborate, and ever-varied. Her fellow (male) senators can’t begin to compare; neither can Anakin and Obi-Wan, the only characters with greater narrative prominence. Of course, as warrior-monks, we wouldn’t expect them to be eye candy – though somehow, that doesn’t prevent skimpily-clad female Jedi from wandering about as they swing laser swords. It’s different: men are just people; women exist to be looked at.
Ultimately, what feminist elements we can find in Star Wars seem largely products of the liberal feminist heyday of the 1970s. Early in the decade, it was intended to be an archetypal hero’s journey with a girl in the place of the invariably male hero (Bouzereau, 1997). That heroine became Luke Skywalker, a young man whose gender is so entirely cosmetic that one might wonder why anyone would bother changing it – if the answer weren’t unfortunately obvious.
Leia took over as heroine, subverting stereotypes from her first appearance, but she too was diminished over time. Revisions took her from queen regnant to slave girl and sidelined sister. Even her mother, envisioned as late as Return of the Jedi as an iron-willed woman who fled with her daughter and sent her infant son away for his own safety, dying several years later of unrelated causes, devolved into the tragic Padmé, dying of sheer misery.
Certainly, as I elaborated upon earlier, Star Wars is not wholly anti-feminist; at its best, it presents a character who could have been an icon of liberal feminism, strong-willed, powerful, and determined to be received on equal terms with any men. For a time, she even was. But with each iteration, from concept to film to sequels to prequels, it seems to grow more and more reactionary, combining the occasional progressive impulse with the familiar traditional, dismissive, marginalizing approach to women we can find everywhere.
References
Basinger, J. (1993). How Hollywood Spoke to Women: 1930-1960. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Bouzereau, L. (1997). Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays. New York, NY: Del Rey.
Fisher, C. (2008). 20 Questions. American Theatre, 152.
Kazanjian, H., Lucas, G., McCallum, R. (Producers), & Marquand, R. (Director). (2004). Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
Kurtz, G. (Producer), & Lucas, G. (Director). (2004). Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
Kurtz, G., Lucas, G., McCallum, R. (Producers), & Kershner, I. (Director). (2004). Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
McCallum, R. (Producer), & Lucas, G. (Producer/Director). (1999). Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
McCallum, R. (Producer), & Lucas, G. (Producer/Director). (2002). Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
McCallum, R. (Producer), & Lucas, G. (Producer/Director). (2005). Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
Mulvey, L. (1990). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In P. Erens (Ed.), Issues in Feminist Film Criticism (pp. 28-40). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Schultz, R. (1995). When Men Look At Women: Sex in an Age of Theory. The Hudson Review, 48 (3), 365-387.
Wendell, S. (1987). A (Qualified) Defense of Liberal Feminism. Hypatia, 2 (2), 65-93.
I'm trying to think if there's anything to warn for - um, it's fairly negative about the prequels, I guess, and feminism + Star Wars isn't really a pretty sight at all, but I can't imagine those are a surprise at this point. So ... here it is.
Women and Star Wars
Since the Star Wars series’ debut in 1977, it has successfully appealed to both mainstream audiences and its own fanbase, earning billions of dollars in box office revenue alone. The six movies are among the most visible artifacts of geek culture, setting precedents for the filmmaking industry as a whole, while its characters and settings have become instantly recognizable icons in popular as well as niche media. Thus, the series’ portrayal of women both reflects the attitudes of the culture that has produced it, and influences those attitudes.
The films have been progressive in a number of ways. The Star Wars galaxy is heavily male-dominated (if somewhat less so in recent years), but the female characters that do appear are presented as every bit as competent as their male counterparts. In The Phantom Menace, for instance, the fourteen-year-old Queen Amidala creates a plan to liberate her planet, and not only does her plan succeed, but she personally takes over the capital.
Even when she appears defeated, as when she is captured earlier in the film, she remains capable and resourceful. The “queen” who is captured isn’t Amidala at all, but a look-alike handmaiden. The real queen is concealed as the decoy queen’s handmaiden, Padmé. Even at her weakest, it turns out that she always held the upper hand.
When female characters don’t succeed, or betray personal weaknesses - and the two most central ones, Padmé and Leia, are well-realized enough that they do both - these failings are almost never chalked up to their gender. Early in the first film, Han Solo does ascribe their near-demise to Leia’s femininity, but the comment seems to reflect more on his sexism than on Leia’s capabilities; Han has no advice of his own, and Leia promptly (and capably) takes over her own rescue.
In fact, women in Star Wars generally take active roles in their lives. Padmé and Leia are influential politicians. They choose their allegiances, they’re prepared to fight for them, and they actually do so when the time comes. The cast is rounded out by Beru Lars, quietly but firmly opposing her husband’s intolerance of their nephew’s ambitions; a number of female knights and Rebels; Shmi Skywalker, who exercises as much agency as can be reasonably expected of a slave; at least two more ruling queens; and Mon Mothma, former Imperial Senator and leader of the Rebellion.
The movies also step away from damaging female stereotypes. The Madonna-whore complex is nowhere to be seen in any of the films, from 1977 to 2005. Leia, the first female character to appear in the series, simultaneously carries on two separate relationships with two different men - one an affectionate camaraderie borne out of affinity and mutual understanding, the other a sexually-charged, quasi-antagonistic cooperation. The three of them are one another’s best friends.
Contrary to what one might expect, however, Leia is never dismissed as “slutty” or “wishy-washy,” whether she’s declaring her love to Han or kissing Luke - within the space of a few minutes. There is no suggestion from either the characters or the narrative that one of her relationships should exclude the other, even before the revelation that she and Luke are twins.
At the same time, however, Leia is very far from a Madonna figure. She can be somewhat maternal towards her brother, when they’re not busy slaughtering their enemies, but is otherwise abrasive, impatient, and fierce. She displays almost no tolerance for weakness in herself or in others, resembling no one so much as her formidable father, Darth Vader, and betraying little similarity to either the generic mother figure or her own mother, the sensitive, diplomatic Padmé Amidala.
Padmé, nevertheless, also transcends damaging stereotypes. While the character’s arc is dominated by her inevitable maternity (and death), she is not primarily identified as a mother and never seems to define herself as one. In fact, the whole dynamic of the Skywalker family defies the tradition of protective fatherhood and sacrificial motherhood.
Sacrificial motherhood is the familiar idea that “no matter what, the woman must give up anything and everything for herself so that her child will have a better life” (Basinger, 1993, p. 426). A mother’s role is to sacrifice whatever is necessary for her children, whether it’s an enjoyable job or her life; a father’s is to protect his children from harm. As the most central parents in the entire saga, one would expect the highly gender-typical Anakin and Padmé to do the same.
However, nothing of the kind happens. Their children are concealed from Anakin/Vader out of the (mistaken, though somewhat justified) expectation that he would have no interest in protecting them from harm, and is in fact himself the primary danger to them. When he discovers his son’s existence, it only takes two brief interactions for Anakin to sacrifice his life for him.
Padmé, on the other hand, does nothing of the kind. The narrative goes to somewhat ludicrous lengths to insist that Padmé’s death is completely unrelated to her motherhood, even though she has just given birth to premature twins after having been strangled into unconsciousness. Padmé’s arc ending with her death by despair is certainly problematic enough. However, it clearly avoids the tradition of mothers sacrificing everything they are for their children.
Luke and Leia are intensely vulnerable newborn infants, with a death sentence over their heads, and the last hope for the galaxy she loves; if any children need their mother, they do. However, Padmé can’t give up her own needs for theirs. They can’t give meaning to her life, or grant her the will to live. Instead, she apparently wills (or un-wills) herself to death, her last thoughts wholly unconnected to their children; Anakin’s last words are about Leia.
Leia herself must be the focal point of any consideration of the portrayal of women in Star Wars. She’s by far the most central female character in the series, and one of the most central characters, period. Thirty-four years after her first appearance, she remains an icon of female authority and resourcefulness.
To understand the weight of her character, it’s important to go all the way back to the very beginning. The opening crawl of the first movie (and each one thereafter) began: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It’s the traditional opening of a fairy-tale, transposed into space, just as A New Hope is itself a fairy-tale transposed into space.
A kind-hearted boy living in dissatisfying obscurity, who discovers his legacy of heroism and power? A wise old wizard who mentors him? A cynical, wise-cracking sidekick? A quest to rescue a damsel in distress? A New Hope reads like a checklist of just about every fairy-tale or heroic fantasy in existence, right down to the princess locked in a tower.
Then we actually meet the princess. Leia doesn’t trail after them like a good little prize; she questions their authority and competence. She refuses to put up with Han’s explicit, hostile sexism, but she doesn’t have much time for Luke’s benevolent sexism either. She adapts their rough plan, defends herself against attackers, and takes over her own rescue. She’s the only one to realize that their escape is actually a trap, and as a military leader incorporates that knowledge into their strategy. Instead of becoming a hero’s reward, this princess gives their reward (medals) to them; that is, she becomes the acting subject, not the object.
The hints that we’re about to see something different from the traditional fairy-tale princess are there from the beginning. Leia precipitates the whole plot, stealing the secret plans and sending them to a friend of her family. Not only that, but the narrative continues to follow her throughout the movie; the original trilogy generally consists of two related, but independent storylines which periodically meet up. Leia is the focus of the first, Luke of the second, and they get about equal screen-time regardless of whether they’re together or not.
Where Han is a sidekick, whose storyline is only relevant insofar as it relates to Luke or Leia, and who is almost only ever seen in conjunction with one of them, Leia herself is closer to a deuteragonist. In overall narrative importance, she’s second to only Luke himself, and never defined by him.
In fact, Leia isn’t defined by anyone except herself. She’s never defined as Han’s love interest, for example; if anything, he’s hers. She’s not reduced to Luke’s sister, either. The fact that they’re siblings at all is only discovered in a last-minute reveal in the third movie, which is promptly followed by splitting their storylines again, following each of them separately and (again) devoting about equal time to her. Neither is she identified as Darth Vader’s daughter: though he must be her father, and though striking similarities subsist between them, the connection is kept firmly on the periphery of her identity.
As mentioned above, Leia rejects objectification. Initially, she refuses to be the hero’s beautiful, vacant reward, but it goes well beyond that. In what is unfortunately her most famous scene, Leia is captured by Jabba the Hutt, an evil criminal mastermind. He forces her to wear a skimpy metal bikini, and keeps her under his control by attaching a chain to a collar at her neck.
Ubiquitous as the costume has become, Leia never wears it by choice, but is forced to become a sexual object for his pleasure. She frees herself at the earliest opportunity, choking him to death with the chain: that is, she frees herself with her own chains, in an unsubtle but powerful rejection of patriarchal control. She spends the rest of her time in the clothing that she prefers (princess gowns and practical pantsuits, depending on the occasion).
If this were all, Leia would be a largely unambiguous exemplar of female strength. Unfortunately, it’s not; powerful and promising though she may be, Leia’s characterization is deeply problematic in other areas.
The last image in Revenge of the Sith is of the Skywalker twins. The infant Leia is concealed in plain sight, adopted by one of their mother’s allies and friends; Luke is hidden on remote Tatooine. She grows up in the heart of the Empire, safely anonymous, while Luke lives under their father’s name, with their father’s relatives, on their father’s home planet. Obi-Wan Kenobi personally oversees this separation.
We are never told why they must be separated, or why Luke alone receives the brunt of their father’s legacy. Luke and Leia are twins with, in this less than scientific universe, presumably equal capacities: they are both naturally gifted pilots, they are both highly sensitive to the Force (the wizardry-cum-deity that governs the universe), and they are both their father’s children. Yet nobody shows the slightest interest in training Leia – only Luke.
In fact, Obi-Wan, who held Leia in his arms when she was born, appears to have entirely forgotten about her existence in The Empire Strikes Back. He, the Jedi who has transcended mortality, unequivocally announces that Luke is the galaxy’s last hope. Leia is apparently of little worth to him; it’s the alive and mortal Yoda who has to remind him that, actually, Leia might be worth educating after all. But only if Luke fails; in the event, he succeeds, so she’s never taught at all. Leia intuitively uses the Force to ascertain that Luke has survived, and that’s the end of it.
The parallels to liberal feminism’s long fight for “education for girls and women equal to that offered boys and men” (Wendell, 1987, p. 66) is, unfortunately, quite clear. As late as 1983, we are still seeing a woman, brilliant and talented in her own right, refused the educational opportunities that would allow her the same opportunities as her brother.
Even their father, who recognizes her potential (for galactic domination!) the moment that he’s made aware of her existence, regards her as distinctly secondary to Luke. If Luke won’t turn to evil, Vader will be forced to corrupt Leia. If Luke does turn to evil, Obi-Wan will be forced to train Leia. Whatever their other differences, the two men are clearly defining her as little more than a second-best alternative to her brother. Moreover, between the two of them, Leia is placed in an impossible bind – no matter which one of them triumphs, Leia is confined to the position of a less-worthy protégée to someone, or never being trained at all.
Leia is also effectively depowered over the course of the original trilogy. It’s easy to point at the quasi-objectification with the metal bikini, but something perhaps more significant happens to her in Return of the Jedi. She loses her power – not her power as a female character, but the very real political power she possessed in the first two movies.
In almost her first line, Leia announces herself a member of the Imperial Senate. She is also an ambassador, spy, and heir to authority over a planet. Even after Alderaan is destroyed, her leadership authority is respected by just about everyone – Leia included.
Upon first meeting Han, she informs him that he will obey her orders. He feels compelled to first trivialize and then sexualize her authority, but in actuality he does quickly follow her lead. When they return to the Rebellion, Leia is promptly greeted as an equal by the military leadership, though she has no official position herself, and she certainly considers herself the equal to anyone. She joins the other Rebellion leaders to plan their assault on the Death Star in A New Hope, and personally delivers orders to the troops in The Empire Strikes Back.
From that moment on, however, her authority diminishes. In Cloud City, she is greeted with a smarmy “what have we here?” She simply introduces herself by her given name. Han, apparently moving from his initial hostile sexism to a gentler paternalism, leaves her under the protection of his best friend, the hairy, towering and of course male Chewbacca. She retains some power in the relationship, strangling Lando by proxy and controlling the ship, but the next time we see her, even this much will be gone.
In Return of the Jedi, Leia has apparently left the Rebellion entirely to go after Han. Her earlier positions of power have gone either to men, or to extremely minor female characters who speak once and are never seen again. Luke has done the same thing, but simply remains outside the Rebellion’s command structure, leaving and returning as the whim takes him; he answers to no one. Leia, on the other hand, becomes a foot soldier under Han’s command and then, worse still, the pampered prisoner of a tribe of overgrown teddy bears.
She has likewise become less important narratively. While the narrative does (as mentioned before) continue to follow her, she does nothing that any other soldier couldn’t do equally well. In the few scenes that are specifically about her, when her father and brother fight over her fate, Leia isn’t even present. She doesn’t need to be; it’s not about her, it’s about how she influences their actions. By the end, Leia only matters insofar as she relates to her male relations.
Neither are all the problematic elements, from a liberal feminist viewpoint, focused on Leia alone. Almost every single character in the original trilogy is male; the few exceptions are relegated firmly to the background.
The prequel trilogy offers little improvement. There is more female representation, certainly; more background figures and minor characters are female, but as far as the main cast goes, this is very much a man’s galaxy. Leia and Padmé are unavoidably representative because they are the only women of any significance whatsoever. Ultimately, Star Wars offers three roles to women: irrelevant eye candy, political figures and their decoys, and dead mothers.
Apart from Leia, the four most important female characters are all maternal figures: Beru Lars, Luke Skywalker’s (dead) aunt; Breha Organa, Leia’s (dead) adoptive mother; Shmi Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker’s (dead) mother; and Padmé Amidala, Luke and Leia’s (dead) natural mother. Each woman’s significance to the plot comes from her motherhood, her character arc is dominated by it, and, of course, each of them is doomed to die.
Beru, for instance, only briefly appears as the supportive aunt to Owen’s gruff uncle. They’re promptly killed by stormtroopers, and largely exist to motivate Luke’s decision to become a Jedi. Breha appears in one scene and looks motherly; if she isn’t already dead by the original trilogy’s timeline, she gets blown up with Alderaan. Shmi disappears early in the prequel trilogy; she’s later tortured to death, dying in Anakin’s arms and triggering his first step towards the Dark Side. Padmé’s imminent death triggers his final step, and she then commits suicide with her mind.
Overall, none of them are important in their own right. They matter in how they affect the men around them. In Star Wars, a woman’s significance is, as Budd Boetticher puts it, in “what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance” (Mulvey, 1990, p. 33).
This puts Star Wars in a very long, very damaging tradition of subordinating not just particular women to particular men, but the female to the male – valuing women only in their relationship to men, or their appeal to men. Unfortunately, Star Wars succumbs to the latter, too – the male gaze is very strong with this one.
The male gaze is, as Schultz summarizes, the way in which women are “displayed for rapt contemplation [. . .] scattered like parks or resorts, little retreats for the male imagination, strokes to the ego and hooks for commerce” (1995, p. 369). Laura Mulvey’s original, groundbreaking essay describes the different directions the male gaze can travel. Star Wars is a major offender in every respect.
First, the male gaze exists within stories themselves; that is, a female character is the object of a male character’s gaze. Jabba ogles Leia in the metal bikini, registering her only as a vehicle for his own gratification. Secondly, the female character is the object of the presumably male, heterosexual audience’s gaze. Male fans have likewise ogled Leia, to the point that her entire character is overshadowed by that single sequence. In a slightly more complex variation, the audience can also identify with the male character looking at the female character; the male character becomes the vehicle through which the female character is objectified by the presumed audience.
This latter point is, I think, a crucial one. Earlier, I described how it is Jabba, not Leia, who is responsible for the objectification in respect to the bikini. However, it’s important to consider that this is a story and film: that it is constructed. Jabba is not real. Princess Leia is not real. The screenwriter who constructed a plot point around objectifying her is, however, real. Carrie Fisher, forced to lose enough weight to appeal to the presumed audience, is real. While the sequence is complicated by Leia’s rejection of the role, ultimately Jabba is nothing more than an excuse to titillate the audience at the expense of a powerful female voice, to silence her. As Fisher puts it, “When Princess Leia loses her clothes, she loses her ability to speak” (2008, p. 152).
Nor is this the only time that plot points are invented to draw male gazes to the female characters. Padmé, almost as notoriously, spends her only battle scene in Attack of the Clones wearing a skintight white suit. Early on, it’s conveniently ripped by an alien monster, revealing her back and midriff for the entirety of the sequence.
These sorts of transparent plot devices may seem harmless enough, but they are very specifically gendered. Apart from a brief shirtless scene, there is no equivalent titillation for female viewers. This is about men gazing at women who, by nature of the medium, can never gaze back, reducing them to little more than bodies.
Women’s to-be-looked-at-ness is emphasized by costuming. Many of the male characters wear the same outfit every time they appear, or very similar ones. Obi-Wan Kenobi, for instance, appears to have worn the same set of robes over the course of some thirty years. Anakin Skywalker alternates between customized black Jedi robes and his customized black suit as Darth Vader. Male characters’ clothes are generally utilitarian and often uniform across the profession they belong to.
Of course, we see nothing of the kind with women. Even setting Leia aside, her mother Padmé’s clothes are practically eye-candy in their own right, rich, elaborate, and ever-varied. Her fellow (male) senators can’t begin to compare; neither can Anakin and Obi-Wan, the only characters with greater narrative prominence. Of course, as warrior-monks, we wouldn’t expect them to be eye candy – though somehow, that doesn’t prevent skimpily-clad female Jedi from wandering about as they swing laser swords. It’s different: men are just people; women exist to be looked at.
Ultimately, what feminist elements we can find in Star Wars seem largely products of the liberal feminist heyday of the 1970s. Early in the decade, it was intended to be an archetypal hero’s journey with a girl in the place of the invariably male hero (Bouzereau, 1997). That heroine became Luke Skywalker, a young man whose gender is so entirely cosmetic that one might wonder why anyone would bother changing it – if the answer weren’t unfortunately obvious.
Leia took over as heroine, subverting stereotypes from her first appearance, but she too was diminished over time. Revisions took her from queen regnant to slave girl and sidelined sister. Even her mother, envisioned as late as Return of the Jedi as an iron-willed woman who fled with her daughter and sent her infant son away for his own safety, dying several years later of unrelated causes, devolved into the tragic Padmé, dying of sheer misery.
Certainly, as I elaborated upon earlier, Star Wars is not wholly anti-feminist; at its best, it presents a character who could have been an icon of liberal feminism, strong-willed, powerful, and determined to be received on equal terms with any men. For a time, she even was. But with each iteration, from concept to film to sequels to prequels, it seems to grow more and more reactionary, combining the occasional progressive impulse with the familiar traditional, dismissive, marginalizing approach to women we can find everywhere.
References
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Bouzereau, L. (1997). Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays. New York, NY: Del Rey.
Fisher, C. (2008). 20 Questions. American Theatre, 152.
Kazanjian, H., Lucas, G., McCallum, R. (Producers), & Marquand, R. (Director). (2004). Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi [Motion picture]. United States: Lucasfilm, Ltd.
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Schultz, R. (1995). When Men Look At Women: Sex in an Age of Theory. The Hudson Review, 48 (3), 365-387.
Wendell, S. (1987). A (Qualified) Defense of Liberal Feminism. Hypatia, 2 (2), 65-93.