A New Rebel-Alliance: Agency, Cooperation and Coalition among Star Wars Cyberchicks

Carly Schuster

The Star Wars epic seems to epitomize the genre of ‘boy films’; it offers a plethora of big guns, fast ships, enslaved royalty in a gold metal bikini, and a morally polarized contest between good and evil for galactic ascendancy. In addition to a large contingency of male devotees, a network of girls profess their undying love for the inhabitants of the “galaxy far, far away”, constructing tribute websites, e-zines, and fan fiction that extend, reformulate, and reconceive the Star Wars universe within a community of like-minded fans. How does this film, which barely attempts to disguise the patriarchal armature underpinning the narrative, attract the rabid devotion of so many young female enthusiasts? These girls make no effort to fit in with their male counterparts, as most of their shrines are clubs with a firm policy of ‘no boys allowed’, and the “Organa-Zation” webpage and email list boldly sport a fuchsia font while the “Star Wars Chicks” website opts for tasteful lavender. These spaces generated by Star Wars Cyberchicks serve as a forum where girls can gush about their crush on Luke Skywalker, worry over the birth of Leia’s twins in the novels published as part of the Extended Universe, and offer each other support in their own Star-Wars-related creative endeavors. Could these girls be accused of ascribing to dominant feminine ideologies, and thus entrenching the male-centeredness that dominates the films, or is there more at work behind their interactions with the Star Wars text? In this paper, I argue that the network of girls that participates in these web-based collaborative projects is the antithesis of the isolated, narcissistic, self-absorbed feminism that critics claim dominates the Third Wave. It is, rather, a radically subversive community forging the laws and norms of a new political entity that is continuously re-imagined as girls learn how to rule their domain on the net. In appropriating and reformulating a patriarchal narrative within a new context and new media, and making it relevant to their lives through engagement with the text and with one another, the alliance of Star Wars Cyberchicks generates a new space for itself using the internet to mediate its new mode of cultural production.