First, though, I want to acknowledge the force of Hudson's argument. In some sense, as she says, the dearth of women in Star Wars is arbitrary. There's no diegetic or contextual reason for it. If Star Wars were the Western that it in many ways imitates, then of course you wouldn't necessarily expect there to be lots of female gunfighters, because gender roles back in the time period when Westerns are often set restricted what women could do. But Star Wars isn't a Western; it's a science-fiction story, which means anything goes. As Hudson says, "Science fiction in particular has always offered a vision of the world not myopically limited by the world as it exists, but liberated by the power of imagination." The creators of Star Wars could have used those powers of imagination to create a world with lots of important female characters. Instead, they chose to create a world in which women barely exist.

Since Star Wars isn't forced by its plot, then, to erase women, it seems like it should be easy enough to include them instead. As evidence, Hudson points to the Star Wars expanded universe novels, which she says include many strong female characters and which could serve as a blueprint for a less lopsided demography in the upcoming films.

Certainly, if Star Wars can pick up some solid women characters from the expanded series, that would be all to the good. But I'm still not convinced that doing so would get to the root of Star Wars' gender imbalance—or, as Hudson says, to Hollywood's.

Because, after all, the lack of women in Star Wars is not arbitrary. Star Wars is a genre picture—and the genre is, broadly, boys' adventure. The series is devoted to battles, adventure, politics, more adventure, and more battles. Girls certainly can—and certainly do!—like all of those things. But the fact remains that the genre has historically been focused on boys. Which means that it has been a lot more concerned with providing points of identification for guys than with points of identification for girls. It's not an accident that it's Leia rather than Han who ends up in the swimsuit and chains, right? (Even though she remains, even in chains, badass.)

Genre and gender, then, are tied up together. Sci-fi imagines different worlds—but those different worlds are governed in no small part by particular narrative expectations. The galaxy isn't as far away, nor as teeming with possibilities as it looks.

While Star Wars' particular brand of sci-fi may have limited resources imagining gender, though, the same is not true for all sci-fi. On the contrary, in prose, if not in Hollywood film, the history of sci-fi over the past 50 years has in no small part been the history of exploring gender.

Certainly, some folks still write space opera and adventure sci-fi (like the Star Wars expanded universe). But since the 1970s at least, many major and popular authors have turned to focusing not just on new technologies and distant places, but also on new societies and even new bodies. Way back in 1969, Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness imagined a planet where the human-descended inhabitants had only one sex; it is only during the monthly mating time that they take on gender identities and sexual urges. In Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-2000), a post-apocalyptic Earth is invaded by aliens with three genders. There are males, there are females, and there are ooloi, a sex of genetic mixers and manipulators, who are able to mate with, and thereby reengineer, human men and women. More recently, Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra's comic book series Y: The Last Man imagined a world in which a plague had wiped out all males on earth except one.