En/Gendering Trouble with J. J. Abrams’s Rey in The Force Awakens: Re-Subjecting the Subject to a Performative Subjectivity

Abstract

Episode VII: The Force Awakens follows a trend in disrupting the privileging of the heroic protagonist as male, refusing to frame women by enforcing a particularly male self-projected binary for popular consumption. Yet this article argues in the first place that this turn is less transgressive of hegemonic gendered norms than might appear to be the case to the inattentive viewer of the saga. An important reason for this, and second in the logic of the argument of the article, the construal of the very form of Rey’s subjectivity involves an ontological intensification of the Cartesian subject rather than its reconfiguration. In other words, it demands an active or autonomous subject rather than a dialectically historical process of subjectivation. The third claim is that Rey is caught up in being subject to the movie’s political conservatism, and this involves the assumption of a binary code at a particularly crucial point, reinforcing the concerns about the determinative subjectivity.