Many of the pieces we’ve published during December have talked about representation. It’s an issue that connects fan culture and academic culture, especially my own field of history. It’s most often raised in relation to the creation of content, but to close out this series I want to think about the relationship between representation and interpretation, both of content and the processes by which it’s created. Because it’s not just about who gets to write and direct, or who gets to cosplay, or who gets to be a historian, or who is on the page of a history textbook. It’s about the demographic similarities of the directors who make films and the critics who get to evaluate those films. It’s about the historians who believe that their interpretations should be given equal—or greater—weight than the majority of their colleagues, colleagues who have chosen to center the lives and experiences that historians have long ignored, colleagues who often belong to those selfsame groups. Ultimately, it’s about who gets to take meaning from things and have that meaning-making respected and valued.
Photo credit Jerzy Strzelecki [CC BY-SA 3.0]
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At its most basic, interpretation is explaining what something means, and it’s a complex and messy thing. But even as it’s about evidence and analysis, it’s also always about culture and emotion too, whether it’s happening inside academia or out in the “real world,” whether it’s happening in the framework of fan studies or physics, and most importantly, whether the role of these factors is even acknowledged. As for representation, we’re talking about the presence and input of groups and individuals whose lives and perspectives have traditionally been decentered or excluded entirely.1 This is also a complex and messy issue, as we each exist at the intersection of multiple overlapping categories of identity, some of which invariably give us power in different parts of our lives. But inclusion is not the end. A movie or a work of history can include a whole lot of under-represented people, but if their perspectives are not understood or centered, especially when the story is ostensibly about them, that inclusion isn’t really doing anything positive or productive.
It’s much harder to control who gets to interpret than who gets to create, though. And what broad representation in interpretive spaces can produce is a whole lot of criticism. This criticism can be difficult to handle for creators and historians who believed that simply putting under-represented people in their work was sufficient.2 When faced with critique, some creators and historians simply reject the right of a given group to criticize. Others apologize—or don’t—with the comment: “I didn’t intend that.” Intent doesn’t mitigate impact. But when a creator apologizes by saying “I didn’t realize that what I created could have this meaning,” part of what they’re conveying is that they didn’t do the work to understand the lives and experiences of the people who figure in and consume what they create. All three responses suggest, however, that not everyone has the same right, or even the same capacity, to interpret, let alone have their interpretation and interpretive framework respected. This kind of critique—and these problematic responses—reveal most clearly the importance of representation in interpretation and creation. People bring their own experiences with narratives, characters, relationships, and tropes to their interpretations—they ask different questions of texts and have different ideas about how to tell stories.
These interpretive perspectives matter because context matters. A black woman doing the same thing as a white man isn’t read the same way, in history, fiction, or real life. We know that, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place. In history, for instance, simply interpreting the lives of women and people of color in the ways we have interpreted white men produces bad history. White male ideas of independence and family manifest themselves in the doing of history and the writing of fiction, but bestowing those interpretive frameworks on other people isn’t doing them a service in any way. It’s disrespecting them. For much of Anglo-American history, for instance, a free white man has often been able to draw some of his power—economic, social, and political—from his familial relationships. Family relationships also shaped the power of Anglo-American women, but in very different ways, removing them from lines of inheritance (or even control over the wealth their own labor generated) and excluding them from the political process. For most of the history of British North America and the United States, family enabled independence for white Americans and perpetuated enslavement for most black Americans. Interpreting the histories of all Americans through the lens of the most powerful Americans isn’t inclusion at all.
In storytelling, simply swapping women and people of color into white men’s stories and ways of telling them is just as problematic, and it’s insufficient and insulting to argue that race and gender don’t exist in the same way in fictional worlds.3 Those fictional worlds were created by people in our world and are consumed in our world. You don’t get to handwave away the role of culture in creation and interpretation, even in a galaxy far, far away. Putting Leia in a metal bikini and chaining her to Jabba meant things. Having a son save his father—or kill his father—meant things. Seeing Rogue One in the aftermath of the 2016 election meant things. Having a Mexican man, a Guatemalan man, a Vietnamese-American woman, and a young black man from Britain as heroes meant things. An older man sacrificing his life to save the people he loved meant something—and it meant something different from having younger characters sacrifice their lives. These characters, and their narratives, are all drawn from and embedded in our own world and its ideas.
Photo credit Scott Thompson [CC BY 2.0]
It’s often the inclusion itself that represents an interpretive cul-de-sac. When the interpretation of non-dominant people and perspectives challenges the dominant narrative, the backlash is swift and sustained, as with the New York Times’ 1619 project. When the interpretation of the lives and perspectives of non-dominant people—like half the population—doesn’t appear to change the dominant narrative, rather than consider whether the narrative’s questions and assumptions have been thoroughly reexamined, many are content to write inclusion itself off as unnecessary. If telling the stories of women or indigenous Americans doesn’t change the narrative, do we need to tell those stories at all?4 To put it another way, if Rey’s hero’s journey differs from Luke’s, then it’s not a hero’s journey. If it is the same as Luke’s, then why couldn’t we just get Luke? The double-bind here is clear: if the inclusion of formerly-excluded people and perspectives doesn’t change the dominant narrative, then it was a waste of time, but if it does, it’s a flawed interpretation that must be rejected.
But what about telling universal stories? Isn’t that important? I don’t know if it is, but there’s no doubt that assertions of universality are powerful, so it’s important to consider why certain creators and interpreters can continue to assert that their stories and interpretations are universal even when many around them disagree. Historians don’t talk about universality, per se, but some do talk about what is central, what matters most, what is fundamental to the history of a person, a movement, a nation-state. If you approach interpretation from this perspective, any interpretation of evidence that undercuts the universal story or fundamental truth can and should be qualified, if not excluded entirely.
Photo credit Peter Dowley [CC BY 2.0]
One way we see this power used in fan conversations, in particular, is through the weaponizing of “objectivity.” Anyone who’s spent any time in fan spaces or the replies to Rian Johnson’s most innocuous tweets over the past two years has encountered the idea that such-and-such cultural product is “objectively bad.” In historical interpretation, this perspective is more often framed as neutrality, apolitical interpretation, the lack of an agenda.
At its worst, this perspective leads to the unstated argument that interpretation itself is unnecessary; the text has a singular meaning, and what can seem like interpretation is, at best, merely “misreading” on the part of people who lack the capacity to understand that meaning, and at worst, active “revisionism” by people determined to spin and skew the objective truth. It’s not about who has the right to interpret. It’s about whether interpretation even exists. The meaning of the past—or of Star Wars—is clear. The value of certain people in the past—or in Star Wars—is known. “The fundamental truth about the United States is that it was founded on liberty.” “Star Wars is a tragedy.” “Historians shouldn’t talk about impeachment.” “The end of the movie was a hopeful and satisfying one.” “Strong female characters don’t need romance.” None of these are inherently true, but they can be wielded like clubs to deliver a message to people who would dare to push back: “We decide what’s true. Get over it.”
But even if it doesn’t get to that level, this kind of conversation draws on long-standing stereotypes about who has the capacity for reason—white people, male people, high-status people—and who doesn’t. What this often means is that a given interpretation is deemed reasoned, analytical, neutral, and objective when put forward by certain people, and impulsive, emotional, biased, and subjective when put forward by other people. Moreover, it means that what “objective” people like ends up being valued more highly.5
I’d argue that it also means that people respond differently when they feel that their lives and perspectives haven’t been centered in a narrative. Carrie Fisher said “take your broken heart, make it into art.” We should not ignore the fact that some people make it into fix-it fic while others make it into angry YouTube clicks. We should not ignore that some make it into a fundraiser for the non-profit work of an actor they appreciate while others make it into a fundraiser to reshoot a movie they didn’t like. And we especially shouldn’t ignore that some believe that racist and sexist harassment of actors is an appropriate thing to do with a broken heart.6
Photo credit y Gregory Zeier – Own work [CC BY 3.0]
If you are concerned with the place of under-represented people in academia and film, the issue of interpretation should be as important to you as that of creation, for it’s what lies at the root. The collapse of the academic job market has only accelerated existing trends that pushed women and non-white scholars into precarious positions, ones in which they feel pressured to take fewer risks in their teaching, are given less time and money to support a bold research agenda, and often lack the opportunities to mentor students, especially those whose backgrounds are similar to their own.8 The absence of these voices from the most privileged positions in academia, the ones that would validate their interpretations, is mirrored in the world of film criticism, where white men make up 78% of the field, outnumbering under-represented women by a ratio of 27 to 1. By ensuring these voices remain peripheral, if only by neglecting to do anything about the systems that perpetuate this marginalization, fields like academia and film criticism ensure that the interpretations that these voices offer remain peripheral as well.
When non-dominant voices aren’t trusted to produce valid, meaningful interpretations, when the questions they ask aren’t considered important and relevant, when they can’t express their interpretations without fear of being doxxed or harassed or told they aren’t acting rationally—when they can’t even interpret freely, how can we ever hope they’ll be able to create and have their creations acknowledged and respected?
Editor’s note: the author would like to thank Melissa Johnson for her helpful editorial feedback on this piece.
- The basic assumption undergirding this piece is that the lives and perspectives of some people have been prioritized over others. In the US, the culture in which I have been raised, under-represented people and groups include non-male, non-elite, and non-white people, people with disabilities, people with mental illness, LGBTQ+ people, indigenous people, and people from religious and cultural minorities
- See all of those US history monographs from the 1990s with a chapter about white women and a chapter about black Americans.
- For example, consider Nathaniel K. Jones’ “Learning about Racism: A Star Wars Story.”
- See Alice Kessler-Harris, “Do We Still Need Women’s History?”
- Consider how cheesy romantic movies are discussed relative to cheesy action movies.
- See “New ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ trailer sparks racial backlash” and “Kelly Marie Tran: I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment.” Also note the hesitation to call it racist backlash.
- They could begin by listening to, and taking seriously, the first ten minutes of this podcast.
- See: “Contingency and Gender”; “Adjunct crisis in higher ed: An all too familiar story for black faculty.”; “How Many Women Are Adjuncts Out There?”; “Gender and Success in Academia: More from the Historians’ Career Paths Survey | Perspectives on History”
