I’ve always been under the general impression that if Jyn Erso had been a man she would never have been treated the way she is. She isn’t a great speaker, she keeps to herself, she makes mistakes, she isn’t visually expressive, but these are all just character traits and there isn’t anything wrong with any of them. If she’d been a man they would have called him ‘sensitive’, but she’s a woman so she ‘doesn’t have a personality’. She borrows a line Cassian said that spoke to her and she ‘plagiarized’ him, but Captain America repeats every line anyone has ever said to him and ‘that’s how he say I Love You’. We get stuck in this pattern of “women are Adorkable or Strong Female Character Who Punches People and there’s no inbetween” and that’s not true but Jyn didn’t fit into those two categories so she was wrong in some way, and to some degree, all Star Wars heroines are.
When Leia first appeared on screens she was ‘a bitch’ and ‘needed to be taken down a few notches’
When Padme showed up she was ‘girly’ and ‘overly emotional’
When Rey came out she was ‘too perfect’ and ‘a mary sue’
And Jyn is here and she’s ‘emotionless’ and ‘makes too many mistakes’.
This feels less like women aren’t being represented accurately and more like maybe people just don’t want to see women doing anything at all on the screen.
Bodhi was quiet too. Bodhi had a difficult time expressing himself. They say he’s sensitive. It’s weird how that works.
In linguistics we call this “social gender”, which is basically whether a word has a feminine or masculine connotation. This kind of thing can be hard to intuit, since there are no hard and fast rules. Obvious examples include words like “nurse”, which may be technically gender neutral, but it’s got such a strong feminine connotation that many people will clarify “male nurse”. Less obvious examples are words like “muscles”, which all humans have, but the default interpretation is like, a manly guy with bulging biceps.
Many many words have social gender that’s difficult to notice, either because of the natural struggle to see gender, or because it’s just that subtle. So a corpus analysis like this is exciting because it gives concrete data on words we might not have thought twice about!!
