Illustration by Audrey Estok (@AudreyEstok)
Jyn Erso searches the Imperial archives for the Death Star plans in Rogue One with no catalogue, no file name, and no data. Yet she knows immediately when she happens upon the correct entry. “Star Dust!” she exclaims. “That’s it . . . I know because it’s me.”
Like so many of the female characters in Star Wars, Jyn is a conduit for stories about the past that are foundational to the saga’s narrative. She is an archivist (she stores her father’s history after he reveals his plans to overcome the Empire), a repository (she becomes the storage system by which his information is preserved when she commits it to memory), and she is the archived object itself (she shares a name with the data in the Imperial archive). Thus, the practice of recording and communicating history within the saga is a gendered one.
We might think of it in terms of the binary system of computer code that informs everything in the franchise from film production—for example, computerized cinematography in the original trilogy, or the digital effects of the prequels and sequels—to onscreen aesthetics. Binary code is a language that both records and communicates using sequences of 1s and 0s. It is described by Sadie Plant as gendered, with men equal to “1” (“everything”) and women equating to “0,” or “the diagram of nothing at all.”1
Signifying emptiness, women function as repositories of masculinized information in the Star Wars films. The one professional archivist who appears onscreen (Jocasta Nu in Attack of the Clones, 2002) is, fittingly, a woman. When she approaches Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Jedi library—”You called for assistance?” and “Are you having a problem Master Kenobi?”—her speech is reminiscent of subservient protocol droid See Threepio, indicating her gendered and inferior status. The information that she attempts to retrieve on behalf of Obi-Wan is part of a body of knowledge collected by and for the patriarchal Jedi Order, which, in the films at least, includes no women with major speaking parts.
Also in the prequels, Padmé’s dialogue is formulated as questions, which provide space for men to give answers. For example, she asks Jar-Jar Binks “How’d you end up here with us?’ and in one sequence with a young Anakin Skywalker, all of her lines are questions, including “How do you know so much?”, “You’re a pilot?”, and “How long have you been here?”. In addition to storing Anakin’s secrets, Padmé also archives his genetic code when she becomes pregnant, and passes the code on to Luke and Leia.
But whereas Luke’s story is concerned with his future (whether he will turn to the Dark Side or bring balance to the Force as is his “destiny”), Leia’s is more concerned with the past. Like Jyn, she has internalized a set of instructions given by her adopted father. In enacting them (“help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”), she becomes the archived object as well, in the form of a hologram cached by droid Artoo Detoo, replayed over and over again by Luke in A New Hope, then reactivated by Artoo as a nostalgic device in The Last Jedi. Rey, meanwhile, is said by Yoda in The Last Jedi to contain and “possess everything” within herself that is recorded in the ancient Jedi texts, which she saves and archives aboard the Millennium Falcon.
Carolyn Steedman, drawing on Jacques Derrida, suggests that we tend to reduce archives to “memory, the desire for origins” rather than considering them as complex and often messy human constructs that are living and ever-changing entities.2 That filmmakers have consistently over four decades represented Star Wars women as archivists or archived objects, repositories, mere storage systems in the circulation of patriarchal narratives is reductive as well. This is especially so given that in Star Wars’ own official histories in particular, and in most archives in general, patriarchal record-keeping erases and marginalizes women’s stories. Nevertheless, Rogue One does offer hope: for as Jyn finds herself in the archive, her presence there connoting the origin of the original trilogy, it is clear that women’s status in the franchise is not nothing, after all.
Editor’s note: the author has chosen to donate her compensation for this piece to the UCU fighting fund. You can find all of the pieces in our December 2019 Star Wars issue here.
- Sadie Plant, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (London: 4th estate, 1998), 35.
- Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001), 8.
