Must be nice to have so much time on your hands that you can spend all day thinking of things that are racist and sexist.
Bro-y Wan Kenobi: The boggling gender dynamics of “Star Wars” – Salon
The new cast for the forthcoming “Star Wars” sequels has been announced and, as many commenters have pointed out, it doesn’t seem to include many women. Of the seven new cast members, only one (Daisy Ridley) is female. Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia in the first films) is supposed to return along with five other original stars, for a total of 11 guys and two ladies. The future, it turns out, is not especially gender diverse.
This is not exactly surprising. Rewatching the original “Star Wars” film, in fact, a male-female ratio of 11-to-2 starts to look positively progressive. Everybody knows that Princess Leia was the only main female character in “Star Wars IV: A New Hope.” But it’s startling to realize just how isolated she was in the first film, released nearly four decades ago. In fact, as you watch, it makes (somewhat) more sense that Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) ended up lusting after his sister. She was, apparently, the only woman in the entire universe.
That’s not even much of an exaggeration. In the first film, all the rebel soldiers and all the Imperial storm troopers are men: a military decision that makes little sense, especially for the rebels, who presumably need every able-bodied person they can get in their hopeless struggle against the overwhelming might of the Empire. The bureaucracy of the Empire appears to be entirely male as well; All of the Death Star administrative brass are guys (and white guys at that). Rebel commanders are all men too; the rebel pilots who fly against the Death Star, the rebel strategists who stand around a big official-looking computer table to watch the battle; rebel clerical folks scurrying around in the background — all guys.
Outside the military setting, the story is the same. When Luke and company go to the city of Mos Eiseley, a “wretched hive of scum and villainy,” the scum and the villains are all scummy, villainous men. It’s true that in some cases gender isn’t especially determinate; you don’t know for sure what gender the Jawas are, for example, and robots presumably don’t have genders. But in virtually every case where gender is indicated (via C-3PO’s voice, or the fact that the Sandmen are called “Sandmen”), the indicated gender is male. Besides Leia, the only human woman portrayed in the entire film is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role of Luke’s Aunt Beru (Shelagh Fraser).