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anghraineYesterday, continued!
If say, in - okay, in the PT, I guess it's an easy example, if there was - say they were two other women in it, maybe they were like female Jedi. Like Anakin had a friend, a female friend that was a Jedi, and she's like really aggressive and, maybe she's like him, somebody who is aggressive and says whatever comes into her head and that kind of stereotypically masculine type. And then, there's somebody else who's maybe a healer or something, somebody who is sort of quietly strong, and maybe a sort of counterpart, if you have like two characters like that, just as an example, then Padmé wouldn't seem to be "this is what a strong woman is," or simply "this is what a woman is," because there would be these other two.
For me, the answer to the problem is always going to be more representation. The more women you have in something, the less any given woman is saying unless they're all the same way. If there were more black people in SW but they were all swaggering charmers who are morally ambiguous like Lando, then yeah, it would be saying something. When there's only one, you're saying something. The answer is always more representation.
A while back, for example, I wrote a blog about the Slave Leia attire –
Yeah, that was ... I prefer not to think about it, but okay.
a costume that has proven to be a touchstone in the sexualized female character debate.
Well, of course.
Other women have written on the subject as well – on both sides of the argument – but I’ve found that those opposed to Slave Leia rarely argue the merits of the costume in the story, instead looking only at the effects it might have for women in the real world.
Okay, um, right. [sigh] I think that if you don't like the story in the first place, obviously your opinions are going to be different, but mostly the people I find who object to Leia's costume are people who loved her character in ANH and ESB and thought she was horribly derailed in ROTJ. Softened, and basically weakened - I guess to be more palatable as the sort of the girl. And sidelined a lot in ROTJ too.
Like, personally, as somebody for whom she is probably my favourite female character ever - you know, I've written a lot about how her overall treatment in ROTJ is - I find it disconcerting. I find it disconcerting that she no longer has her political power, it's stripped from her, but - that she hardly speaks for about half the movie, when present at all, that she's - the love triangle is sort of awkwardly resolved by making her Luke's sister but that's never really explored except in how it affects Luke. You know especially in the final confrontation where the family plot comes right to the forefront, it's the main plot of ROTJ, and by making Leia a Skywalker they make her part of it, but then by keeping her off-scene she's basically sidelined. What she feels about being Darth Vader's daughter is - she gets like, what? A quarter second of looking horrified? Where Luke gets like half a movie to deal with it.
So it's, I'm not sure it's people, that if you like it, you're willing to forgive it - frankly, reactions to that [sigh] I don't want to stereotype, I really don't, but that is one of the few cases where I see an argument fall pretty strongly along gender lines. It's not that there aren't women who are cool with it, or guys who are "yeah, what was up with that?" but that a lot of the sort of male fans are to this day really gung-ho about that outfit. And I think that most of the objections to that scene are from female fans. I've very rarely seen a male fan say "yeah, that was really fanservice-y and had no effect on the plot at all."
And the other thing is, looking at it in the story versus looking at it in the real world, I think we can safely assume that's because stories are constructed in the real world and their effects are on people in the real world. Now I think, I think what Tricia is going for here is that sometimes people are so eager to jump on the social justice rage, uh, soapbox, that they'l over look - they'll twist the canon to try and make it an argument and ignore what it's really saying.
Like one that comes up with arguments about - one that I see a lot in arguments about racism in Tolkien is that the only evil Elves are the Dark Elves who are villains and dark-skinned and the only people of colour. That's a really stupid argument, because if you look at the actual, like...words? on the page? the Dark Elves are neither villains nor people of colour. They're called that because they never saw the light of the Two Trees and they're - and so, like, I guess, the world is dark to him. And they're not bad, they just never saw the light of the Two Trees, in fact I think they're all good guys and they're all fair-skinned good guys. So while there's undoubtedly racism in Middle-earth, using the Dark Elves as an example of it is really weird. And so I think that's what she's talking about, when people are really twisting the canon for their own purpose, to make this sort of ideological argument.
However. What I also see a lot of, and what I kind of think I thought about her slave Leia blog post, is where you don't look beyond it, you say it had to happen because of the story this way, and stories are constructed. It's like ... I keep saying this. But they are. And so if you're going to argue that well, it worked that way because of the way the story was written, then you have to ask why was the story written that way? Why was the story written in a way that required her to be completely silent for half the movie? Why was the story written in such a way that an amorphous blob for some completely unknown reason finds bipeds to be sexy? Why - why was she captured at all? It would have made just as much sense for her character and for the story if she'd stayed in the bounty hunter costume and waited for Luke to show up.
And - you know, there are - yes, it makes sense in the story that Jabba would want to degrade her and it makes sense that Leia would be really unhappy about it, as indeed she seems to be. And it makes sense that she would choke the shit out of him at the first chance. So it's not that it's not coherent within the story, but that it was constructed in such a way as to create fanservice. I don't think there can be really any question. The other thing is that this, this set piece goes on and on and on, and actually one of the major complaints I've heard about ROTJ is that the Jabba's palace sequence drags - because it's so long - forever. And so I think that [sigh] there was no real need to construct the story that way.
And I think it has an extra layer of discomfort because Princess Leia is made-up and Star Wars is made-up and Jabba the Hutt is made-up. Jabba did not put Carrie Fisher in the bikini. The people who created the plot, the storyline of ROTJ did that. And I find it uncomfortable because Carrie Fisher had to - she was already, was very, I mean she was what, 105 pounds when she got the part and was told to lose ten? That was in ANH. She had to lose even more weight for the ROTJ costume.
And that's something with real consequences. It was something with real consequences just for Carrie Fisher. She's talked about how she thought she was fat back then, and about how it became a sort of central issue of her life and then when she looked back later on, and she's like, when I was Leia, I looked great. And it's like yes. Yes, you did. She looked great in Empire! And so this is something that had a very real effect on the life on the actress who played her, on the - she was one of the first female characters that a lot of girls could look up to, so seeing this happen to her had real effects.
Even for me, I didn't even watch this movie until, like, 2002 - I was really late to the fandom - the first one I ever saw was in 1999, it was The Phantom Menace. And even for me, knowing this is an old character - I mean in terms of me, a character from the 70s - it was still a... watching her stop talking and stop commanding and stop doing things and just sort of sit there and be looked at was...harmful. And it's part of a trend of, this is what happens to these characters, they do get killed or depowered or diminished or softened, that happens a lot, and Leia is part of that trend and I think to say that "well, it's because of Jabba" - they made him up! Characters are not real people! And I think it's important to consider that.
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on 2012-01-28 05:30 pm (UTC)As I grow older, I get more and more profoundly freaked out by how thin Leia looks in RotJ. Carrie Fisher's suffering, yes - but also, in a Watsonian reading, oh my god why did Leia lose so much weight?! Is she okay? Does she have an eating disorder, is she traumatized, is anyone helping her? Watching what reads to me as physical signs of distress be read as sexually appealing is Not Fun.
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on 2012-01-28 08:55 pm (UTC)Leia's thinness -- yeah. I mean, when I was a teenager I just thought "wow her cheekbones are pretty and somehow I never much noticed them before" and later realized it's because her cheeks had about melted off. (These days, I also find her most attractive c. Empire, but maybe that's just me.)
I've tiptoed around it to avoid body-shaming, but in-story the change is so dramatic that it's like "...um, are you okay?" That last sentence of yours, exactly. I think that's what made it skeevy for me even as a teenager who didn't consciously see what was going on. And I've never seen it addressed in any fic or anything, except your -- I don't remember the title, but the OT3 one, where she's so strung-out that she has to be reminded to eat and that's why she's lost so much weight, and I was like THANK YOU FOR ACTUALLY DEALING WITH THIS.
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on 2012-01-29 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-01-28 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-01-28 08:59 pm (UTC)And ha, those are very concise sum-ups. :P