Disney Buys Star Wars: A New Hope for Women and Girls

Last week, one of the only news items to penetrate the horrifying coverage of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation and the nerve-wracking anticipation for the US Elections was the surprising, perplexing, but exciting news that Disney was buying Lucasfilm and planning to release Star Wars Episode VII in 2015. It was like a shot of adrenaline to this weary geek’s heart.

The Five Stages of Disney’s Buyout of Lucasfilm: 1) Denial. 2) Angst. 3) Cautious optimism. 4) Futility. 5) Resignation.
— Eric S. Donaldson (@EricJokes) October 31, 2012

Like every geek, I’m riding the wave of emotions that comes with this news, with renewed “no, there is another” hope for new GOOD Star Wars movies, and anxiety that those hopes will be dashed yet again (I mean, think about what the word “Disneyfication” means.) As a feminist geek, there’s a whole additional layer to conflicted feelings about Disney buying Star Wars: what does this mean for women?

Enormously successful female film producer Kathleen Kennedy is now president of Lucasfilm and “brand manager” of Star Wars after the sale to Disney.  A woman is now in charge of Star Wars.  I don’t know about you, but I’m hearing a chorus of angels sing.

And then an abrupt record scratch, because it’s a naïve fantasy to suppose that having a woman executive produce the new Star Wars films will meaningfully shift the gender balance of the larger creative team.  A quick overview of Kennedy’s credits on IMDb confirm that she’s mostly helped bring male voices to the screen, and a very discouraging (although unsourced and hopefully entirely dubious!) quotation in her personal trivia section has a very “binders full of women” tone:

But what I always find interesting is when you take the areas of writing, producing and directing. I don’t think there’s a great deal of discrimination — although I’m completely perplexed and confused as to why there aren’t more women. For instance, if we’re looking for new, young directors, which is something we do all the time, we certainly never go look at films because they’re directed by a man or a woman. We look at films because they are winning awards, they’re good, and it has nothing to do with gender. And women certainly have equal opportunity to get into a university like UCLA or USC, to get into the film department, to take the same courses to allow them to make films, to deal with a whole gamut of subject matter, and yet I don’t know what happens. There’s something that happens in the process of getting there that seems to turn many women away. – Kathleen Kennedy [Oh, bugger, here’s the source.]

But the fact remains that a woman now controls Star Wars, and moreover the door is now open for new writers, directors, and other producers to step into the Star Wars franchise, and a lot more diversity in the creative team continuing the franchise is now a possibility.

My childhood pretty much exactly coincided with the Disney Renaissance, so even though the Disney Princess marketing machine hadn’t fully sprung to terrifying life, I was pretty obsessed with Disney’s lineup of plucky heroines.  I foolishly assumed they were a cultural touchstone for everyone in my generation, until I was in college and went on a date with a guy who had only brothers, who said he’d never seen an animated Disney movie. “I always thought that was just girl stuff,” he said.

While the Disney Princesses (and the Disney Fairies) get a lot of direct-to-video content and toys, the feature films branch of Disney seems desperate to get that somehow-more-valuable BOY MONEY.  First they bought Pixar, which made animated kids movies untainted by the “girl stuff” smear (this year’s Brave was the first Pixar film with a female protagonist).  Then Disney acquired Marvel’s film division, and went about developing films for even pretty obscure male Marvel superheroes while leaving the women to Smufette-y supporting roles (Though I’m still holding out hope for a She-Hulk adaptation, which could be the brilliantly postmodern Gremlins 2: The New Batch-style answer to the Avengers mega-franchise.)  And while Disney Animation Studios still creates princess-centered features like The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, they alternate these pictures with more boy-appealing fare like Wreck-It Ralph.  It’s easy to worry that Disney has cut its losses with girls, figuring they are only valuable viewers once they’re old enough to obsess over sci-fi/fantasy young adult novels with love triangles.

But while Disney Princess Leia was just an amusing meme for most of us, for me, it was a signal of hope that Disney buying Star Wars could help blur the distinction between “boy stuff” and “girl stuff” when it comes to children’s entertainment.  Bitch Flicks’ Megan Kearns’s excellent feminist character analysis of Princess Leia demonstrates that while the original Star Wars trilogy was extremely limited in its portrayal of women and fell into some harmful tropes with its central female character, what it got right about Leia, it got VERY right.

I firmly believe Star Wars is the cultural juggernaut that it is because it captures young girls’ imaginations as well as young boys’, largely in part because of the dynamic character of Princess Leia.  And given their history of creating female-centric (albeit sometimes problematic) entertainment, and despite recent moves away from that niche, Disney may be the best production company to capitalize on that aspect of Star Wars‘ appeal when making the next trilogy.

The next Star Wars films could bring us more than one—seriously, I swear it is possible—dynamic female character.  We might even see a woman as the central figure in the next trilogy.  Those oh-so-valuable boys will still be bought and payed for by the Star Wars name and universe.  In this brave new world where a “Disney Princess” is a diplomat who carries a blaster, the new Star Wars films might finally break us of gender-segregating our children’s entertainment.