Blogkeeping: 2012 feminism discourse tags

[anghraine]

I'm cleaning up old tags because I'm finally running up against the max even for an upgraded account. And there was a period around 2012 when I'd started using tags on livejournal/Dreamwidth in a Tumblresque running-commentary-under-my-breath way even though 1) they don't work as well on LJ/DW in that way, because they're automatically alphabetized and 2) I wasn't likely to reuse those specific tags, so it's ultimately kind of a waste.

At the same time, I (obviously) prefer to preserve old posts and such as a kind of record of what I was doing and thinking and saying at the time (really putting the "journal" in livejournal!), so I haven't wanted to delete these Tumblr-style tags. They were part of what I was doing back then!

This is especially glaring for an admittedly very wanky series of posts I put together. For context, the liberal-leaning Star Wars blog fangirlblog had recently posted defenses of slave Leia and Padmé Amidala from an allegedly feminist perspective that were making the rounds at the time. I found both takes ... objectionable. It was difficult enough to put together a coherent response that I ended up simply recording myself reading it and responding in real time, and then transcribed that recording into text, ultimately spread across nine different posts. It's very 2012 in a lot of ways—including my much more overt hostility towards the prequels and the OP's extremely binary concept of gender—but also, I do still think the defenses of slave Leia (and even of Padmé in some ways) are short-sighted at best and deeply rooted in fucked-up concepts of gender at worst. In any case, I decided to preserve my tags before deleting them as organizational tags by making a new post (this one!) with the old tags listed.

Part 1: Intro (touches on gender, representation, diversity, marginalization of women in the OT and PT, and over-reliance on "Watsonian" or in-world explanations for choices made by overwhelmingly male creators in constructing narratives). Tagged: #ahoy false catch-22 #feminism marches on #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #strong female characters

Part 2: Slave Leia and constructed narratives. Tagged: #fanservice for great justice #reading comprehension failure #rotj makes me cry inside #stories don't come from shangri-la #strong female characters

Part 3: General commentary & rambling. Tagged: #stories don't come from shangri-la #strong female characters

Part 4: Padmé's derailment. Tagged: #chaotic evil younglings don't count #dudes here dudes there dudes everywhere #enabling is collateral damage #intent is not magic #new qualities as the plot demands #strong female characters #strong male characters #webster emerged from the ether

Part 5: Heroic badasses. This part is pretty meandering and nitpicky even for 2012 me, my transcription is hurried so it's more typo-ridden, and it meanders off into the Harry Potter discourse I'd seen at the time. Tagged: #incorruptible pure pureness (is boring) #lightsabers are awesome #mistress mary quite contrary #nitpicking #power of heart #rule of cool #stanning policing #strong female characters #strong male characters #women aren't a monolith

Part 6: Wherein ... I defend Padmé? Kind of?  Tagged: #bad choices imply choices #badass normal #badassery is not (just) spectacle #c-span with lasers #clarissa harlowe doesn't belong in space #death by despair #enabling is collateral damage #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #mistress mary quite contrary #not everything is about manpain #politics don't have to be boring #stfu rape culture #strong female characters

Part 7: Comparing Padmé. This is one of the earlier times when I was trying to articulate why the Luke = Padmé thing annoys me so much, though I only got partway through it here. #bad parenting #bizarro world #death (nearly) by lightning #death by despair #false equivalency #fantastic aesops #i can fanwank but i shouldn't have to #i ship them for their children #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #love by scientific method #moral dissonance #new qualities as the plot demands #nitpicking #omnia vincit amor #strong female characters #tell your sister you were right #uninformed consent is icky

Part 8: Further compare/contrast. This one is mainly a continuation of Part 7, though it does have one of my earlier articulations of gender wtfery mentioned in passing ("I don't want children, and I'm not really gung-ho about a career and I, my only struggle with my identity as a woman is that, frankly, I feel androgynous and that I've been socialized into being a woman and I resent it. But I don't struggle with - I don't - eh"). Tagged: #anecdata #aromantics are yeti #bad choices imply choices #badass siblings #chaotic evil younglings don't count #death by despair #doylist problems are watsonian problems #eliza haywood ftw #false equivalency #female success shouldn't be family #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #moral dissonance #narrative roles #princess leia ftw #strong female characters #subjective interpretation is subjective #success requires endeavour #women aren't a monolith

Part 9: The end. At the time, I described this as the weakest part on my end. Possibly! Tagged: #bad choices imply choices #death by despair #false equivalency #i am the least concise person ever #i try to be fair but i hate the prequels #not everything is about manpain #princess leia ftw #strong female characters #success requires endeavour #tragic flaws are not bad luck

Honorable mention: My response to that female characters post. This was about a different post that I don't actually recall, but I tagged it in the same way as the fangirlblog rebuttal. Tagged: #dudes here dudes there dudes everywhere #i can fanwank but i shouldn't have to #narrative roles #stories don't come from shangri-la #strong female characters #women aren't a monolith

Comments

[dragoness_e]

A lot of fanfic writers consider the given cause of death for Padme to be complete bullshit and have come up with alternate explanations. The best one, I think, is that one of the Sith was draining her life force--either Darth Sidious as part of his manipulation of Anakin, or Anakin doing it accidentally because of his obsession with saving her from the death-visions. (Or both--I think I've seen one where Darth Sidious created the life-draining bond between Anakin and Padme, to drive Anakin into using Sith methods to futilely try to save Padme, and then later use the knowledge that Anakin killed Padme himself to torment him.)

"Strong female characters" - that phrase sure has gotten a lot of mileage. Personally, I always liked the way Louis L'Amour wrote pioneer women, mountain women, and Western women. They tended to be a tough lot, who took no shit from anyone, but still very much women.

[anghraine]

I don't mean to sound hostile, but there is almost invariably someone (or many someones) who brings up the life-draining Sith whatsit headcanon/fanwank in response to criticisms of how Padmé's arc is handled by Lucas et al. But this theory is an attempt by other people than the creators of the film to clean up what is in the film and has no bearing on criticisms of ROTS as it actually exists. Sure, fans or EU authors or whatever can fanwank away any concept in any films no matter how bad the concept is, but that doesn't make the concept/execution any better and it's frustrating that it's so often used to shut down criticism or redirect conversation from active creative choices made in the production of the films. My linked posts were not about Padmé as an actual person or in-story explanations for her life and death, but about how she is written and constructed as a fictional character. In fact, this fandom tendency towards in-world justifications for poor writing choices is one of the very things I was criticizing in Part 1 back in 2012, which I summarized in the post above as:

over-reliance on "Watsonian" or in-world explanations for choices made by overwhelmingly male creators in constructing narratives

Padmé is already sidelined throughout ROTS and largely matters to the film as a motivator for Anakin (far more than was the case in the previous films, esp TPM) and mother of the twins. Scenes in which she appears in some other capacity than Anakin's secret wife are almost entirely removed (such as her participation in the proto-Rebellion). Her personality is considerably muted from TPM and AOTC throughout ROTS. The decision was made to have Anakin choke her while she is heavily pregnant and for her to then give birth to twins and then for her to die, but not as a direct result of either event.

So Padmé is useful to ROTS's narrative in illustrating the depths of Anakin's fall (she is the first person he chokes on camera) and in bearing Luke and Leia, but the film is also trying to avoid attributing her death directly to Anakin or to Luke and Leia. So we get a really stupid explanation for why she's summarily killed off once Luke and Leia are safely delivered, but it's totally not because of childbirth or Anakin's Force-choke. I don't think the film's explanation of her cause of death is undercut by its presentation in the film—there's no suggestion in ROTS that it's a mistake or misunderstanding or anything other than the actual literal reason she dies. IMO the juxtaposition of her death/funeral with Anakin's survival as Vader (arguably itself a kind of death) is not presented as causal but thematic; Padmé ultimately represents Anakin's connection to normal life and her death is necessary for him to disconnect for the next 20 years. It's about her narrative function, not Sith magic.

So ... tl;dr: the theory does not justify the artistic choices made in the film and also does not explain why Padmé is so sidelined throughout the entirety of ROTS. My personal fanwank is that it's not Anakin or Palpatine draining her at all, but Luke and Leia (entirely unintentionally, of course). I have reasons for preferring this theory, but it's still just headcanon/fanwank that does not make the real film any better.

WRT "Strong Female Characters," as I said in my linked posts, I think it is necessary to have a healthy variety of different kinds of women (not all of whom need to be strong at all) to avoid a single woman like Leia or Padmé carrying so much weight for a narrative. This is one of the reasons I love Austen, for instance; women (and men, for that matter) are not definitionally like each other even while all are living under the pressures of an intensely patriarchal society like late 18th/early 19th century England. No single woman is carrying the burden of good female representation or being a strong woman or being "womanly" enough or whatever, but her major female characters are vivid and nuanced and distinct even with a pretty narrow focus.

[dragoness_e]

That is an interesting and educational analysis.

So Padmé is useful to ROTS's narrative in illustrating the depths of Anakin's fall (she is the first person he chokes on camera) and in bearing Luke and Leia, but the film is also trying to avoid attributing her death directly to Anakin or to Luke and Leia.

So one might say that Lucas did not stick the landing? He weaseled out of blaming either Anakin or the twin babies directly for Padme's death, if I read you correctly.

As for the fanfiction comment, I was thinking of it more from the writer's perspective of "this script doesn't make sense, how can we fix it?"

[anghraine]

Cool, glad you weren't offended by the rant, haha.

So one might say that Lucas did not stick the landing? He weaseled out of blaming either Anakin or the twin babies directly for Padme's death, if I read you correctly.

Yup, exactly. Interestingly, there was an earlier concept of Padmé's pregnancy doing a serious number on her as it advanced, under the logic that carrying both twins meant more of the Force was flowing through her during her pregnancy than through anyone else ever, even though she's not Force-sensitive. So there was this idea that she'd have these horrific visions and things. The idea didn't make it into the film, but it makes more sense to me that what we did get.

As for the fanfiction comment, I was thinking of it more from the writer's perspective of "this script doesn't make sense, how can we fix it?"

Yeah, it's definitely interesting to engage with in the context of headcanon or fix-fic or whatnot.