Is Star Wars a Boys’ Club?

I have a special request for all my fellow Star Wars fans – but especially the ones who remember when it all started.

I’ve got a couple of questions about the fandom and marketing that, as much as I already know, I’m just not up to speed on. It’s partly for a work project (more info below), but also just out of interest.

1. Do you remember reading anything that described Star Wars as a boys’ club – or, on the flip side, recall seeing an appeal to female audiences either in storytelling or in marketing?
2. If you’re a female fan, what first drew you to Star Wars?
3. What kinds characters, stories, or merchandise has the franchise marketed with a clear idea of men/boys or women/girls in mind?
4. What are some of the ways (good, bad, and hilarious) in which Star Wars has tried to appeal to women/girls?
5. What kinds of things have been perceived as gender-pandering, by fans or by the media?

I’m especially interested in concrete examples from before the prequels, but would welcome anything you can send my way. Films, toys, EU, Happy Meal tie-ins. The more specific, the better.

I’m too young (1987) and too foreign (grew up on US military bases) to remember examples from 1977-1990, and I’ve probably missed out on some recent ones as well. The information available online about Star Wars marketing and mythmaking is pretty sparse before 1995 – no surprise, given that the internet wasn’t really a big thing until then – and there’s no way I can afford all the paper fanzines, adverts, articles, and reports I would ideally like for this project.

Here’s a list of some topics I’m already looking at [updated 13 November 2016]:

• Princess Leia action figures (OT era)
• Covergirl’s TFA make-up line
• Responses to the casting of Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor in TPM
• OT early screening invitees
• Female employees at Lucasfilm and LucasArts
• Wear Star Wars Share Star Wars
• Dathomir and the Nightsisters (in The Courtship of Princess Leia and The Clone Wars)
• The ‘Tales from’ EU anthologies (Jabba’s Palace, Mos Eisley Cantina, etc)
• R2-KT
• Marcia Lucas
• Leigh Brackett
• Kathleen Kennedy
• Comparisons between Leia and Padmé
• Characters explicitly used as young adult role models (Ahsoka Tano, Sabeen Wren, Tenel Ka, Jaina Solo, etc.)
• The #WheresRey campaign
• Discussions about BB-8’s gender
• HerUniverse.com

I would hugely, hugely appreciate any info you can give me. Tips for where to look or who else to ask are also very welcome.

You can get in touch with questions or suggestions on Twitter (@MegenJM), via e-mail (DeBruinMJ@cf.ac.uk), or just by commenting on this post.

May the Force be with you!

A little background info / disclaimer

I’ve been a Star Wars fan since 1994, and have been hanging around TFN since 2001. I even penned and beta-read some fanfic on the TFN forums, though I can’t for the life of me remember my original login password. Now I’m a teacher and academic researching popular culture (more here: www.frankenfiction.com). Although my fandom is a huge part of who I am, and why I ended up doing this kind of work in the first place, I haven’t had the chance to write about or research Star Wars – until now. 

I’ve just been chosen to write a chapter for the upcoming book Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. It’s scheduled for publication in 2017, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of ANH. The point of this book is to argue that Star Wars ‘laid the foundations for the forms of convergence culture that rule the media industries today […] spreading that storyworld across as many media platforms as possible’.

My chapter will argue that even though the news media tends to pitch Star Wars as a boys’ club, it actually did a remarkable job of inspiring female fans from the very beginning. Rey has gotten a lot of attention lately, but she’s only the latest in a long list of reasons a woman might want to watch Star Wars. Even aside from Princess Leia, there have been lots of ways the franchise has gone out of its way to try and appeal to women, and even though some of its early attempts fell flat or flew under the radar, it helped to pioneer a lot of the storytelling and marketing strategies that have taken over twenty-first-century culture.

I will obviously ask for your permission before I even think of using anything you say in the book, so feel free to speak your mind. I’m mainly interested in whether other people’s experiences overlap with mine.

If you’re looking for more of a technical explanation of what the chapter is about, you can check out my other blog post on it: http://frankenfiction.com/feminist-politics-star-wars/.