Women Warriors Break the Mold: Kara “Starbuck” Thrace versus the Gender Binary Part I

[bardic_lady]

“What’s the point of a female role model, it might be asked, if she is barely recognizable as feminine?” – Ewan Kirkland, “A Dangerous Place for Women”

 

            Over the centuries, the battlefield has been primarily populated with male warriors, defending land and country and the women and children waiting back at home. Only rarely in this history do women make appearances in the ranks of heroes and warriors. These exceptions to the rule are primarily portrayed as maidens and outsiders, denied human comforts by their decision to pursue an “unfeminine” path. The Biblical Judith risks her life in a way that none of the men of her country are willing to and then remains alone for the rest of her life. After seeing her daughters raped and being tortured herself, Queen Boudicca leads her people against the supposedly invincible forces of Rome and then kills herself to avoid the possibility of capture and torture. Jeanne d’Arc’s life is marked by deprivation, she is eternally the Maid of Orleans, never to enjoy the companionship of another person. This solitude is rewarded with an inquisition and painful death. (Early 56-57) In more recent years, various forms of popular media have relied on stories of war and battle for entertainment and once again, the killing field has been dominated by male warriors, with women relegated to the position of damsel in distress or in other ways turned into objects for the hero’s quest, rather than active participants in their own protection with their own accomplishments. However, with an upswing in science fiction television, sufficiently distanced from reality to avoid being inferred as a direct critique on society, women warriors have begun to appear in film and on television. With each iteration and each further portrayal, the woman warrior has evolved. Early woman warriors such as Ellen Ripley in the Alien series and Sarah Connor in the Terminator series have a lot in common with mythological/historical aggressive women. Their choices, and lack of choices, cause them to be ostracized as their behavior is too far outside of societal expectations  for women. The generation that followed them progressed significantly. Both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess were allowed to be both feminine and tough at the same time. Buffy, a petite blonde, is always dressed stylishly and, over the course of seven seasons, has intimate relationships and maintains a close circle of friends. Xena also has a close group of friends and her relationship with her companion, Gabrielle, is closer to a dedicated long-term relationship than anything previously seen in women warriors. However, both of these heroines are still outcasts in their communities and are accused of either being eye candy heroines, all outward appearance and no substance, or of only being effective when they take on ‘masculine’ personae. Because of the societal expectations placed on women, these women warriors still disturb the status quo and hence make some viewers uncomfortable. One of the most recent examples of a television woman warrior appears in the form of a character from a reimagining of a 1970s campy cult classic. Lt. Starbuck of the original Battlestar Galactica was a drinking, gambling womanizer who also happened to be a soldier. In Ron Moore’s new vision, he became she, Lt. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. The new character kept a number of the old Starbuck’s character traits, underpinned by a gritty reality and fierce determination that turned a free-wheeling playboy into a woman warrior more fully realized than any of her predecessors. The new Starbuck is far from an idealized woman warrior, seamlessly integrated into her surroundings and perfectly balanced in her character, but she is a complete person, flawed and ferocious, critiquing modern society from her place after an apocalypse.

 

            The role of the woman in a classic warrior story oscillates between an object of desire, in need of the hero’s aid and support, and the monstrous female, frequently the barrier between the just warrior and his ultimate aim. By making the woman herself the warrior, the story has already transgressed the societal expectation and the character must be framed differently to inform the audience of the new rules inherent in a character who does not fit into a previously understood category. In an essay on another prominent television woman warrior, Nikita of La Femme Nikita, Laura Ng paraphrases well-known gender theorist Judith Butler on the ways in which society views women’s responsibilities, based on their bodies. “Society sanctions or denies … access to specific body parts based on gender. It sanctions women’s use of their hands to nurture or prepare food but not to inflict harm” (Ng 110). By crafting a character who is woman and warrior at once, the sanctions are broken, allowing the character more freedom, but this can cause additional fears to surface.

 

Describing Binaries

            There are numerous characteristics which are traditionally ascribed to one gender or the other. This binary mode of thinking informs a wide variety of attitudes that impact the reception of woman warrior characters. In Striptease Culture: Sex, Media, and the Democratisation of Desire, Brian McNair provides a chart divided into gender categories, of some such characteristics (McNair 2). Because binary thinking proposes that a person is either one thing or the other, with no spectrum in between, and even more that these divisions are along gender lines, it is easy to see how a woman warrior would seem to be playing male, rather than acting as a woman with these personality traits.
Part II