Visible Women

Meta
Title:	Visible Women
Creator:	Chris Callahan
Date(s):	1982
Medium:	print
Fandom:	Star Wars
Topic:
External Links:
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

Visible Women is a 1982 essay by Chris Callahan. The art is by Letitia Wells.

It was printed in the feminist multimedia zine Storms #2.

This essay, as well as The Female Hero: Personal Reflections on the Appeal of Leia Organa, were likely responses to Princess Leia: An Analysis, or Running the Alliance is Not All Fun and Games published in "Storms" the year before which some fans felt had been too short.

About

The author analyzes all of the fiction in the zines below and what the role of the female characters in them play.

Equal Space | Facets #7/8 | Falcon's Flight #1-6 | Galactic Flight #1- | Guardian #2-3 | The Jedi Journal #1-3 | Kessel Run #1 | Millennium #1 | Moonbeam #3 | The Mos Eisley Tribune #1-3 | Pegasus #3-5 | Scum & Villainy | Showcase | Skywalker #3-4 | Time Warp #3-5 | Twin Suns #2 | Warped Space #32-46

The excerpts from the essay below do not include the very, very lengthy and detailed analysis of each of the many stories. Most of those can be read at the individual zines themselves.

The Author's Criteria

Callahan's criteria is a bit like a pre-Bechdel Test:

Aside from limiting the field to humans, my criteria for selecting the characters covered in this survey are rather loose, and not every character meets all the requirements. The most basic of the requirements are:

1) the character's existence as an individual who could be featured in her own story without any reference to Luke or Han

2) the character's presence in the story as written being justifiable on grounds other than romantic interest and/or "local color"

3) the avoidance of stereotyping of personality and/or role. The Jedi women sometimes fail to meet these requirements, but they have been included because they are Jedi, a purely fannish concept, and one which assumes a certain level of competence, even if the character as written ends up being stereotypically female. Some other women, on the other hand, have been left out because, though they may meet the first or second requirement, or both, they are either bound totally by role (strictly as mother, etc:) or because they are essentially stereotyped males with female physiques and perhaps some emotional problems thrown in to make them pass as female.

Some readers may object that a couple of those included should be left out on one or the other of these grounds. Yes, there is a certain amount of subjectivity in the choices, just as there is in the criteria themselves. For example, I am not a "radical feminist" in the usual sense of the term, so my choice of critoria and characters will differ considerably from the choices of someone who is a radical. And someone more conservative than I am would have still other choices. So it goes.

Also rather subjectively I've chosen three categories for discussion: Jedi, Alliance members, and independents.

From the Essay

[Introduction]:

One of the more interesting phenomena of STAR WARS fanfic, to me, is the number of women in the stories, especially those who do something besides provide romantic interest for the male leads and otherwise conform to aspects of the traditional female supporting role. And a respectable number of female romantic leads are strong characters in their own right, with lives and minds of their own.

In the films STAR WARS (aka A NEW HOPE) and THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK women are mainly in the background except for Leia and Beru, and, perhaps stretching a point, the female officer in the Hoth Command Center. In ANH a few women wander through the streets of Mos Eisely or hang out in the cantina; there are no women visible among the Imperial officers in either film or among the rebels on Yavin's moon, and only the one (possibly two) on Hoth. There is no mention of female Jedi in either film, and none in the novelizations, while the term "knight" does seem to imply an all-male group. And of course there is the glaring omission, in films and books, of any reference to Luke's mother. Altogether, the films so far give the impression of an overwhelmingly male (human) galactic population. The scarcity of females is so obvious that at Noreascon, during Gary Kurtz's presentation on TESB, a member of the audience (male, if I remember correctly) brought up the subject. Applause. Kurtz admitted rather sheepishly that they'd goofed badly. Loud, sustained applause.

But shortly after the blatantly msculinist ANH came the fanfic, written primarily by women. Suddenly the SWars universe acquired a much more balanced population, and, along with improved sex ratio, a relatively unquestioned assumption that in this highly advanced galactic civilization, women and men are more or less equal legally and socially. There are even a large number of female Jedi. While all too many of the women are simply "local color," romantic foils, and otherwise more or less stereotyped, a large proportion are strong, independent individuals with their own claim to existence.

The rest of this article will consist of a (necessarily) brief survey of these positive (ie, reasonably feminist) characters. Leia and less than positive portrayals will be left for possible future discussion, as will more in-depth study of the positive characters. But first, for the benefit of readers who want to compare my choices with theirs, and to save time for those who wonder if I deliberately left out their favorites or simply didn't know the characters, here is a list of the zines I read, with abbreviations appearing in the citations:

Jedi:

George Lucas provides absolutely no justification for the existence of female Jedi, human or otherwise, past or present. Ben Kenobi refers to them as knights, which seems to imply an exclusively male membership; Yoda tells Luke that "only a fully trained Jedi with the Force as his ally can defeat Vader and his Emperor." On the other hand, very little information has been provided about the Order in the stories or by Lucas and his associates, which leaves the field clear for fannish speculation. Accordingly, a number of writers have assumed the existence of female Jedi, apparently considering the term "knight" to be sex-neutral and Yoda's use of "his" to be the usual general use of the pronoun rather than the specific (after all, we're constantly being told that the male pronoun "includes" the female, right? Right!). By the way, being a Force sensitive and being a Jedi are not the same in fanfic. Here I will be referring only to those born or raised as Jedi, not those who are merely Force sensitives.

Alliance Members:

Though there is only one female officer shown on Hoth, and no female Alliance members except Leia in ANH, many writers have invented female pilots, spies, etc in the Rebellion. Unfortunately most of them seem to exist to provide romance for Han and/or Luke, but a few are real people in their own right, regardless of their relationship or lack thereof with the male leads.

Independents:

By far the majority of strong female characters are independents, neither Jedi nor officially part of the Alliance, though they may associate with it to some degree on their own terms. Most of them are spacers; most, regardless of occupation, work to a great extent outside whatever law is in force; and, perhaps unfortunately, they are invariably associated in some way with Han — family, old friends or colleagues, or meeting him for the first time in the course of the story. The association hasn't by any means disqualified them, however, even if there is a strong romantic attachment past or present. Any of them could stand in her own story, if the author chose to write such a story, and the romantic relationships, even when important, do not dominate their lives or "identify" than. For simplicity's sake I have divided these characters into family, new associates of Han, and old friends and colleagues.

[Conclusion]:

Spacers, smugglers, thieves, Jedi, mentors; a few of them are mothers, even grandmothers, aside from their primary identifications. Some are better developed than others, but all of them (with the exceptions of a few of the Jedi) are multi dimensional, real people, with strengths and weaknesses, all characters with stories of their own to tell. None are superwomen (with the one Jedi exception), though some could be considered over achievers. The range of occupations is rather narrow, but it gives an idea of the possibilities available in a galactic civilization. And possibilities are what science fiction are all about.

George Lucas provided a basic framework; the fan writers have been building on it in various and wondrous detail. Now that some of the more adventurous have shown how to do it, more writers should be able to follow in discovering how great apart women can play at all levels of this universe. Role models have been provided — they should be studied and used, even surpassed. It is possible, for those who are willing to try.

Reactions and Reviews

Chris Callahan points out that A New Hope was considered by many to be "blatantly sexist" (I don't agree. Of the three main "heroes", one is a female. That's better odds than we get in most fiction and films!), but that fanfic came along shortly after the movie, and suddenly "the SWars universe acquired a much more balanced population ... along with a relatively unquestioned assumption that in this highly advanced galactic civilization women and men are more or less equal legally and socially." Callahan then proceeds to give an overview of some of the "Visible Women" in SW fan-fiction. She gives as her criteria the following: 1) the character's existence as an individual who could be featured in her own story without any reference to Luke or Han; 2) the character's presence in the story ... being justifiable on grounds other than romantic interest and/or 'local color'; 3) the avoidance of stereotyping of personality and/or role. Callahan studies Jedi, Alliance members, and "independents". I do not always agree with her choices (neither Ariel Solo, Kaili Lars, nor Lyann Skywalker strikes me as strong--nor even as particularly believable or competent), nor with her basic premise that sexual equality is "unquestioned" in fan-fiction, but I think that she has done a good job in presenting a thoughtful and interesting introduction to the subject of women in Star Wars fandom. I would be interested in seeing more development of this theme, both in adding a study of some of the characters introduced in fan-fiction since the inception of this issue of Storms and in studying some of the characters who are in categories not covered by Callahan (what of the Imperials? Surely Susan Matthews's Jennet Ap Rhiannon is as interesting a person as Naom Pre?).