Creating an inclusive portrait of Star Wars fandom

Doc­u­men­tary pho­tog­ra­ph­er Rhyn­na San­tos sparkles with excite­ment as she thinks back to the first time she saw Star Wars at the movies dur­ing her child­hood in Puer­to Rico. From the first thun­der­clap of the film’s brash over­ture, San­tos was instant­ly hooked by epic David and Goliath sto­ry set in out­er space.

“I could­n’t speak Eng­lish, so I did­n’t know what peo­ple were say­ing but from the first scene I was visu­al­ly tak­en aback, just ter­ri­fied and excit­ed at the same time,” San­tos says. ​“I com­plete­ly fell in love with it.”

After Santos’s par­ents divorced, she moved to Cal­i­for­nia and was imme­di­ate­ly con­front­ed by the twin engines of racism and xeno­pho­bia. Although the Unit­ed States has main­tained colo­nial con­trol over Puer­to Rico since 1898, its cit­i­zens have long been open­ly treat­ed as sec­ond class.

Star Wars, with its Resis­tance formed against the Empire became an oasis into which San­tos could escape; but she remem­bers, ​“It was a real­ly lone­ly expe­ri­ence. I was always ashamed of lik­ing Star Wars because peo­ple real­ly bul­lied me. I did­n’t want to tell peo­ple what a big nerd I real­ly was.”

With the pas­sage of time, the script has flipped as the Star Wars uni­verse has become a beloved fran­chise the world over. With the arrival of con­ven­tions, a new era of fan­dom emerged. San­tos attend­ed her first con­ven­tion and imme­di­ate­ly felt at home. ​“I began to under­stand I was­n’t the only one that loved Star Wars deep in their heart,” she says.

But the big­otries of the out­side world remained. San­tos wit­nessed a plus size woman dressed as Queen Ami­dala win the annu­al cos­tume con­test amidst an ugly spec­ta­cle of fat­pho­bia. Grow­ing up as a plus sized per­son, she under­stood the lay of the land and used it to pave her own path, return­ing the fol­low­ing year with cam­era in hand, ready to con­nect her new pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy with her secret love of Star Wars.

“I want­ed to pho­to­graph peo­ple like me what I did­n’t see in fan­dom, which were plus size women and peo­ple of colour. That is where ​‘Fan­dom Unbound’ began,” San­tos says. ​“Then I start­ed doing audio inter­views to hear oth­er peo­ple’s expe­ri­ences with being reject­ed with­in fan­dom because of being of colour or their size, and also the pain of not being seen and it only but made me even more ener­gy to the project.”

As a life­long fan, San­tos under­stands Star Wars lore runs deep, its con­structs and com­plex­i­ties giv­ing many out­siders a feel­ing of being seen in a cul­ture that cap­i­talis­es on era­sure and con­for­mi­ty. With the ongo­ing series ​“Fan­dom Unbound,” San­tos cel­e­brates peo­ple across race, gen­der, abil­i­ty, and body type, giv­ing every­one a moment of recog­ni­tion that pos­sess­es unlim­it­ed power.

As an adult San­tos can now give her­self the com­mu­ni­ty she lacked in her youth, and in turn pro­vide for oth­er fans. ​“I felt like if I don’t make these pho­tos, no one else will like,” she says. ​“These are the pho­tos I wish I had seen as a kid. It would have made a big dif­fer­ence for me.”

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