#Wheresrey?: Toys, spoilers, and the gender politics of franchise paratexts

Abstract

This article presents the hashtag activist movement #wheresrey, along with additional paratextual responses to the controversial lack of Star Wars toys featuring The Force Awakens’ female protagonist, as a rich site of paratextual convergence that allows us to explore the gender politics of media franchises. Specifically, this article suggests a growing need to consider how media industries alternately hail, mobilize, and marginalize their imagined franchise fan bases through paratexts. Although scholarly work on paratexts has explored their gatekeeping functions, this article strives to bring pre-existing paratextual theory in more direct conversation with gendered franchising and fan discourses. At the center of this analysis is a call for a more robust theorization of toys and action figures as the paratextual objects that most consistently and starkly reflect a franchise’s presumed demographics, while still affording a great deal of agency in the creation of user-generated paratexts.