Picspam: "Women in SF (mostly) who Influenced Me"
I've been wanting to look back at the shows with strong women characters which influenced me growing up (and which still do), so here they are. Photos are taken from wherever. I'm really sorry about not giving credit, I've just never done this before and some of these have been wandering around my hard drive for years. There are minor spoilers for Star Trek TNG and DS9, Earth: Final Conflict, Babylon 5, Firefly, Stargate: SG-1, West Wing, The X-Files, Criminal Minds, and The Wire.
To put this in perspective, I turn twenty-four this year (2009). I started watching Star Trek from about age seven or eight, then Earth: Final Conflict and X-Files around ten or eleven, Babylon 5 in early teens, and the rest spread out until all of Stargate in one long marathon this past summer and Criminal Minds and The Wire now. These ladies have really made an impact on who I turned into because I had few other strong female role models around me as a kid and teen. Certainly none in the trades, the active military, or aviation.
We grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. In retrospect, I think Tasha Yar was my first crush. A woman in charge of security! Boy's haircut! At the time I didn't understand why she left, but I remember when I realized that Denise Crosby didn't like that her character wasn't developed enough. That really opened my eyes to considering characters and actors when telling stories.
My first foray into internet fandom was Earth: Final Conflict. The ladies in the fandom were very nice and supportive of me. If it hadn't been for them, I probably wouldn't have been courageous enough to write fic and fail spectacularly at social interaction. It was a learning experience, even if it only lasted about a year. I adored the show until they killed off Boone, at which point I went back to watching the X-Files.
I suspect Lily Marquette bears some responsibility for my becoming a Marine, even though her being a pilot was the reason I adored her. I didn't really know what a Marine was until she had an episode for herself where she and Da'an crash-landed and the Corps came up as a strong influence on the character. I loved her because she was strong in an elite job, being a pilot for the alien Companions, and as an active part of the resistance she was smart and a bad-ass, not a token girl.
Here's some totally gratuitous alien ship. I wanted one of these so bad.
I include Da'an here from Earth: Final Conflict because I adored Da'an as much for the genderfuck as much as for his character, his independence from his fellow aliens, and his subtle I know more than you think expression. He was a "he" in the show but was played by a woman, Leni Parker, who is gorgeous and totally stole the scene every time she was around.
Somewhere in here, I had a short fling with Babylon 5. It blew my mind because I was too young to understand it, but I do remember re-watching it in '04 and realizing that Ivanova had made a huge impression on me by scaring the crap out of me. Every time she was on screen with Talia, I hid or tried to fast-forward because they made me very uncomfortable. In retrospect, they were confident women who got what they wanted and it broke my thirteen-year old brain. They were dangerous, they made me embarassed. I didn't want to watch them. I'm still working this out in my head. I know I missed out on a lot because it's essentially an adult story and I'm still planning on watching it again, beginning to end, to give Ivanova and Talia their due.
The next show I got swept up in was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I read the novels, watched the show, and generally fangirled. Dax was my favorite character on DS9. Dax, the bad-ass scientist, reminds me now of Sam Carter, only more socially fluent. Again with the genderfuckery through the Trill/human theme. I adored how her relationship with Sisko wasn't that of a young woman scientist but of Curzon, an old male friend. Seeing her hang out with him, the two of them teasing each other like men do, opened my eyes to the flexibility of gender roles. Now, I joke with my guys in the same easy way and I laugh when I re-watch the episodes. Also, her early-season slap-downs of Bashir were great. She married Worf about the time I stopped watching and I think they were well-matched. I don't remember much about Ezri (still Dax, new actress/changed character).
Kaylee's my favorite lady from Firefly. I loved how she wears pink and patterned shirts with her dirty coveralls, fixes stuff with nothing, and generally is a bad-ass mechanic. I also like that she hung out/joked with Inara and Zoe, so her role models weren't all men. She's a lot like me in a lot of ways, only a lot more at ease with being a girl. She wasn't a man, didn't want to be a man, but did a man's job with style. I loved her delight when she wore and kept the pink frilly dress. She's come up from nothing but didn't let that be an excuse. She grabbed her ticket out of town and capitalized on her talents. She constantly worries about whether she's good enough but her confidence grows over the season, she just needed someone to give her a few words of praise and a sense of responsibility. She could so easily be the little kid but she's not treated like the helpless heroine; in a lot of ways she's more worldly than a lot of them. I wanted to see where her romance with Simon would go but of course, the show ended.
Sam Carter of SG-1 is my hero. I want to be her when I grow up. Bad-ass warrior-scientist, part of a close team, engineer/problem-solver, principled, fucked up and inept socially, and really freaking hot in body armor, jumpsuit, or coveralls. Especially with the P-90. And she gets to wander around the universe. Sometimes when I'm in the middle of engineering school and I want to punch people and set fire to my textbooks, I watch some Stargate and it motivates me. (Yeah, keep laughing.) It probably helps that I mainlined all ten seasons of Stargate this past year while sitting on the USS Tarawa for seven months, so it dominated our shop's in-jokes and my own private headspace for the entire deployment.
Doc Fraiser of Stargate breaks my heart. She's an incredibly tough woman who sees exactly what the teams suffer but supports them without being able to actually protect them in the field. She's a mother figure in that she takes care of them but has to step back and let them go off on their own. She has no control over anything but her infirmary and from the first bit of Stargate crazy she stepped up and, like Sam, developed answers to problems. She also got have Cassie, which just doubles the awesome.
In West Wing, CJ lays down the law with the press corps but is, again, kind of brain-crazy. Her humor is a huge part of why I love her. She's also smart, tough, a fighter, and principled. She has morals! I identified with the Saudi Arabia thread especially because the way that country does treat their women just breaks my heart and nobody does anything about it, so I understand where she's coming from. She's in a position where she ought to be effective in changing policy but she's fighting an uphill battle. Instead of making excuses and giving up, though, she keeps showing up to work and taking on her male colleagues. She is genuinely feared by the men around the office and the ass-chewings she gives are delightful.
Also in West Wing, Abbey Bartlett is her own woman and she loves her husband, but part of loving him is standing up to him when he's being stupid. She's also got all those other causes she works for and she stands up for them because it's morally right. I just can't identify with characters who don't have that moral compass. I love her because she is emotional and fierce and passionate and incredibly intelligent, and, of course, she gets to wield a lot of really funny lines. I adore West Wing humor.
The X-Files' Dana Scully's ability to snark right back at Mulder, and to take his crazy in stride, delights me. The best episodes were the character-driven ones where it's about who she is and what she believes in. She's loyal to Mulder and again, the moral compass, on the path of the truth. Once Doggett came, I gave up because that dynamic with Mulder wasn't there, but I don't think it defined her. It just defined the show as a whole.
Criminal Minds' Garcia is awesome, standing out in a show where all the women are strong and consistently written. Garcia, like Fraiser, sends her family into danger but is there at every turn. She's wickedly funny, openly flirting, and embraces her eccentricities instead of hiding them in an attempt to be normal. She's found her element. Her banter with Morgan has driven me to hiccup-laughter and I appreciate the events of Penelope because it gave her character a chance to have an arc. Her relationship with Kevin is made of win; tech geeks have lives and need love, too! I wish we'd see more of her this season.
Finally, here's my most current favorite character. The Wire's Kima Greggs not only kicks ass in an entirely male profession but she gets to go home to a beautiful woman and have the same awful, blaming, guilty, worried, husband-wife arguments as her male colleagues. The relationship isn't idealized, it's rocky and shows the hardships. It's not just about presenting and displaying hot lady-sex. Her dedication to her job is something I understand, too. Despite getting shot, she got back up to do what she's found she loves. She, like most of other women on this list, has figured out what she wants and has achieved it, thriving despite all the obstacles.
Watching the determination of these strong women motivates me. I understand where they're coming from and I relate to them. I'm in a male-dominated field, I'm often the only woman around, I blend male and female traits, I'm constantly arguing about things only I seem to see are wrong, I've finally figured out what the job is that I really love, and I have clear career goals that are more important to me than starting a family or settling down. Even if they're not totally fitting all those characteristics, I like my women on TV to be real people with real concerns, not stereotypes written by men to be politically correct and draw in female viewers.
In writing this piece, I realized that I don't generally watch a show for very long if there aren't convincing, consistent, strong women in leading roles. I can't think of any others I really fell for the way I fell for these.
To put this in perspective, I turn twenty-four this year (2009). I started watching Star Trek from about age seven or eight, then Earth: Final Conflict and X-Files around ten or eleven, Babylon 5 in early teens, and the rest spread out until all of Stargate in one long marathon this past summer and Criminal Minds and The Wire now. These ladies have really made an impact on who I turned into because I had few other strong female role models around me as a kid and teen. Certainly none in the trades, the active military, or aviation.
We grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. In retrospect, I think Tasha Yar was my first crush. A woman in charge of security! Boy's haircut! At the time I didn't understand why she left, but I remember when I realized that Denise Crosby didn't like that her character wasn't developed enough. That really opened my eyes to considering characters and actors when telling stories.
My first foray into internet fandom was Earth: Final Conflict. The ladies in the fandom were very nice and supportive of me. If it hadn't been for them, I probably wouldn't have been courageous enough to write fic and fail spectacularly at social interaction. It was a learning experience, even if it only lasted about a year. I adored the show until they killed off Boone, at which point I went back to watching the X-Files.
I suspect Lily Marquette bears some responsibility for my becoming a Marine, even though her being a pilot was the reason I adored her. I didn't really know what a Marine was until she had an episode for herself where she and Da'an crash-landed and the Corps came up as a strong influence on the character. I loved her because she was strong in an elite job, being a pilot for the alien Companions, and as an active part of the resistance she was smart and a bad-ass, not a token girl.
Here's some totally gratuitous alien ship. I wanted one of these so bad.
I include Da'an here from Earth: Final Conflict because I adored Da'an as much for the genderfuck as much as for his character, his independence from his fellow aliens, and his subtle I know more than you think expression. He was a "he" in the show but was played by a woman, Leni Parker, who is gorgeous and totally stole the scene every time she was around.
Somewhere in here, I had a short fling with Babylon 5. It blew my mind because I was too young to understand it, but I do remember re-watching it in '04 and realizing that Ivanova had made a huge impression on me by scaring the crap out of me. Every time she was on screen with Talia, I hid or tried to fast-forward because they made me very uncomfortable. In retrospect, they were confident women who got what they wanted and it broke my thirteen-year old brain. They were dangerous, they made me embarassed. I didn't want to watch them. I'm still working this out in my head. I know I missed out on a lot because it's essentially an adult story and I'm still planning on watching it again, beginning to end, to give Ivanova and Talia their due.
The next show I got swept up in was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I read the novels, watched the show, and generally fangirled. Dax was my favorite character on DS9. Dax, the bad-ass scientist, reminds me now of Sam Carter, only more socially fluent. Again with the genderfuckery through the Trill/human theme. I adored how her relationship with Sisko wasn't that of a young woman scientist but of Curzon, an old male friend. Seeing her hang out with him, the two of them teasing each other like men do, opened my eyes to the flexibility of gender roles. Now, I joke with my guys in the same easy way and I laugh when I re-watch the episodes. Also, her early-season slap-downs of Bashir were great. She married Worf about the time I stopped watching and I think they were well-matched. I don't remember much about Ezri (still Dax, new actress/changed character).
Kaylee's my favorite lady from Firefly. I loved how she wears pink and patterned shirts with her dirty coveralls, fixes stuff with nothing, and generally is a bad-ass mechanic. I also like that she hung out/joked with Inara and Zoe, so her role models weren't all men. She's a lot like me in a lot of ways, only a lot more at ease with being a girl. She wasn't a man, didn't want to be a man, but did a man's job with style. I loved her delight when she wore and kept the pink frilly dress. She's come up from nothing but didn't let that be an excuse. She grabbed her ticket out of town and capitalized on her talents. She constantly worries about whether she's good enough but her confidence grows over the season, she just needed someone to give her a few words of praise and a sense of responsibility. She could so easily be the little kid but she's not treated like the helpless heroine; in a lot of ways she's more worldly than a lot of them. I wanted to see where her romance with Simon would go but of course, the show ended.
Sam Carter of SG-1 is my hero. I want to be her when I grow up. Bad-ass warrior-scientist, part of a close team, engineer/problem-solver, principled, fucked up and inept socially, and really freaking hot in body armor, jumpsuit, or coveralls. Especially with the P-90. And she gets to wander around the universe. Sometimes when I'm in the middle of engineering school and I want to punch people and set fire to my textbooks, I watch some Stargate and it motivates me. (Yeah, keep laughing.) It probably helps that I mainlined all ten seasons of Stargate this past year while sitting on the USS Tarawa for seven months, so it dominated our shop's in-jokes and my own private headspace for the entire deployment.
Doc Fraiser of Stargate breaks my heart. She's an incredibly tough woman who sees exactly what the teams suffer but supports them without being able to actually protect them in the field. She's a mother figure in that she takes care of them but has to step back and let them go off on their own. She has no control over anything but her infirmary and from the first bit of Stargate crazy she stepped up and, like Sam, developed answers to problems. She also got have Cassie, which just doubles the awesome.
In West Wing, CJ lays down the law with the press corps but is, again, kind of brain-crazy. Her humor is a huge part of why I love her. She's also smart, tough, a fighter, and principled. She has morals! I identified with the Saudi Arabia thread especially because the way that country does treat their women just breaks my heart and nobody does anything about it, so I understand where she's coming from. She's in a position where she ought to be effective in changing policy but she's fighting an uphill battle. Instead of making excuses and giving up, though, she keeps showing up to work and taking on her male colleagues. She is genuinely feared by the men around the office and the ass-chewings she gives are delightful.
Also in West Wing, Abbey Bartlett is her own woman and she loves her husband, but part of loving him is standing up to him when he's being stupid. She's also got all those other causes she works for and she stands up for them because it's morally right. I just can't identify with characters who don't have that moral compass. I love her because she is emotional and fierce and passionate and incredibly intelligent, and, of course, she gets to wield a lot of really funny lines. I adore West Wing humor.
The X-Files' Dana Scully's ability to snark right back at Mulder, and to take his crazy in stride, delights me. The best episodes were the character-driven ones where it's about who she is and what she believes in. She's loyal to Mulder and again, the moral compass, on the path of the truth. Once Doggett came, I gave up because that dynamic with Mulder wasn't there, but I don't think it defined her. It just defined the show as a whole.
Criminal Minds' Garcia is awesome, standing out in a show where all the women are strong and consistently written. Garcia, like Fraiser, sends her family into danger but is there at every turn. She's wickedly funny, openly flirting, and embraces her eccentricities instead of hiding them in an attempt to be normal. She's found her element. Her banter with Morgan has driven me to hiccup-laughter and I appreciate the events of Penelope because it gave her character a chance to have an arc. Her relationship with Kevin is made of win; tech geeks have lives and need love, too! I wish we'd see more of her this season.
Finally, here's my most current favorite character. The Wire's Kima Greggs not only kicks ass in an entirely male profession but she gets to go home to a beautiful woman and have the same awful, blaming, guilty, worried, husband-wife arguments as her male colleagues. The relationship isn't idealized, it's rocky and shows the hardships. It's not just about presenting and displaying hot lady-sex. Her dedication to her job is something I understand, too. Despite getting shot, she got back up to do what she's found she loves. She, like most of other women on this list, has figured out what she wants and has achieved it, thriving despite all the obstacles.
Watching the determination of these strong women motivates me. I understand where they're coming from and I relate to them. I'm in a male-dominated field, I'm often the only woman around, I blend male and female traits, I'm constantly arguing about things only I seem to see are wrong, I've finally figured out what the job is that I really love, and I have clear career goals that are more important to me than starting a family or settling down. Even if they're not totally fitting all those characteristics, I like my women on TV to be real people with real concerns, not stereotypes written by men to be politically correct and draw in female viewers.
In writing this piece, I realized that I don't generally watch a show for very long if there aren't convincing, consistent, strong women in leading roles. I can't think of any others I really fell for the way I fell for these.