clarify defintion: Twofer Token Minority

Okay. Here's the problem. A lot of examples include women as a minority without any context. Just skimming the list I can find two examples of shows that I'm familiar with where half of the cast was female. Should those stay there? In my opinion examples like Uhura from Star Trek fit because she was the only female from the main cast, but examples where women are well represented don't fit.

If half the cast are female and someone is only a token minority because of something else, they're not an example.

edited 20th Jan '11 12:54:48 PM by halfmillennium

Even Uhura is a little iffy because she wasn't the only minority in the cast, Sulu is Asian, Spock was an alien and they had regularly appearing female characters with Rand and Chapel. The first season she wasn't even an official cast member, just appeared in near every episode.

You can have more than one token in a show. Sulu was the token non-Caucasian male, Uhura was the token black, as well as one of the token females. Rand was not much more than a Living Prop ("Then there are those kinds of recurring characters who don't actually have any involvement with the plot except as Padding, and whose only purpose is to create a certain sense of stability ... They have very few spoken lines, if any at all — it's usually along the lines of "Hot or iced?" or "All systems ready, Captain". Most of the time they just stand there in the background, as if they are a permanent part of the scenery that might as well be a living prop.") and Chapel wasn't much better.

Also, "alien" isn't a minority. That's a stupid idea that leads to things like DC declaring their comics are racially diverse because they have green people.

Uhura I thought was more there because of being black than being a woman.

On another front, what about Barret from Final Fantasy VII? He's black and has a prostetic arm (cannon).

If aliens aren't a minority, neither are cyborgs (though I don't actually agree with that). I don't think someone with an Arm Cannon really counts as the "token handicapped", if that's what you were going for.

Yeah, I don't think women count as a minority in any remotely modern work. Uhura, I get. She was considered a little more progressive back then, but I found the page potholed from Friends, where Charlie was listed as a token twofer, and I point-blank stopped 'cause I couldn't work out what the second minority was. Not only are women by and large not so hugely underrepresented in 2000s drama, but on a show like Friends, an extra female actively nudges the lady-count into the majority.

Female examples will very rarely count pre-1990. In shows that are very definitively male-dominated, sure - Kochanski in Red Dwarf would've been a token female, and you could make (flimsy!) arguments for the female characters in Sherlock - but I don't think "being female" counts toward the twofer quota very often nowadays.

edited 2nd Sep '11 9:22:19 AM by robwebster

I agree, examples have to consider setting and time/place of writing. And the character's role. A woman in a leader position might count, but not just any woman in, say, a Sci-Fi series.