Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Game of Thrones and the Death of Feminism!

A word of warning: this essay contains spoilers related to episodes of Game of Thrones current as of its date of publication.

While violence against women has always been an enduring motif in both the Game of Thrones the television series and its antecedent books from The Song of Fire and Ice cycle, it has always been couched in a certain kind of Chandlerian acquisition of agency: the women of Game of Thrones are often victimized by their circumstances, unable to physically participate in the wholesale violence that constitutes the most visible layer of agency in Westeros, and are legally equated to property and summarily utilized as bargaining chips intended to cement familial bonds and ties.  However, even within those frames, they exercise authority, often through a combination of a capacity to navigate social spaces and endure acts of physical and mental violence. 

What I'm referring to as the Chandlerian paradigm of agency emerged in the wake of World War I and the subsequent Great Depression, as the decline of white-male authority in America began to present itself, and multicultural awareness, and the ability to navigate multicultural spaces with relative cultural invisibility began to emerge as significant means of agency and authority in works of popular culture.  My frame of reference emerges from detective fiction, where the protagonists of entrenched authors like Dashiell Hammett, who engaged with the world around them largely by exercising both physical and social authority over others through a combination of violence and inherent social power (imbued on them by virtue of their position as white men of status) began to be uprooted, and then surpassed by the protagonists of writers like Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, who instead used a combination of social mobility and physical and emotional endurance to navigate obtuse, foreign, and dangerous physical and social spaces.  These navigations still drew on constructs of white male authority (the capacity to present oneself with cultural ubiquity is one of the more insidious notions of white privilege, difficult to discuss and nearly impossible to nail down) but engaged with a notion of feminized power that rose in prominence throughout the post-war period, and would eventually cement itself as a counter-patriarchal cultural construct which by now has thoroughly infiltrated much of our popular culture.  To choose a random example,  The Big Lebowski not only draws heavily from the plot of Chandler's The Big Sleep, it also engages with a similar relationship with agency and social power in its various dealings, with a protagonist who rarely turns to violence, and navigates his conflicts almost entirely through structures of durability and social mutability.  The Dude's authority in the world comes from his ability to abide.

Game of Thrones emerges from this tradition.  Whether it does so reflexively or consciously is inconsequential, the thread of feminized power in Martin's work is clear.  Strong, stalwart men vested with conventional authority who attempt to exercise physical or cultural agency are met with short term success, often attaining a particular goal for a brief period of time before inevitably being removed from power or killed, while the characters who navigate those structures using less direct approaches, approaches that encourage their long term survival, usually exist outside of the paradigms of male authority as agency.  To compare two arbitrary examples, let's look at Ned Stark, who represents an archetype of both male power and moral forthright goodness, is extremely capable at doling out violence, and utterly incapable of  navigating foreign social spaces or engaging in any patterns of cultural mutability, and Caitlin Stark, Ned's wife, who exercises her authority behind the scenes, often simply by being able to endure circumstances (such as losing her beloved and being married off to his brother, who she is then forced to build a life with), through her power as a mother (wherein she exercises authority over and through her children in order to propagate and perpetuate her influence, a common exercise of authority in Martin's social landscape), or through her ability to abide and endure tragedy, physical pain, and humiliation.  In the books, the forthright Ned dies roughly halfway through the first entry in the series, decapitated at least in part because he disregarded the power and tact of a number of feminist or feminized authority figures in the urban environment of King's Landing.  Caitlin, on the other hand, outlasts him handily.  She goes on to assist her son in waging a war, with a great measure of success and, at least in the books is so adept at enduring hardship that comes back from the dead (though she does so through a more complicated set of tropes tied up in their own obtuse gender politics). 

This is not an uncommon pattern in Game of Thrones, and one of the pleasures of the Game of Thrones television series for me has been watching the actualization of these strong feminist characters in a violent and hostile world.  Whether it's Cersei Lannister's bloody machinations exercised through her authority as a mother, daughter, and creature of sexual agency, or Arya Stark's covert acts of violence and social transgressions, enabled by her relative cultural invisibility and self-conscious efforts to distance herself from the markers of her sex and identity, the enduring plotlines of Game of Thrones have been dominated by strong female-bodied or at the very least feminist characters who have survived while other characters imbued with more conventional male agency have died.  Hell, if this summer gets slow, I could easily work up a character-by-character breakdown on how most of the surviving cast of the television series represents feminine power or, at the very least, departures from paradigms of male authority.  In Westeros, those who can endure surpass those who can injure.  Always, always, always, on a long enough time scale.

Or, at least, they did until recently.

The latest season of Game of Thrones has departed from the books quite starkly during the last season, and I've got complaints.  Not fanboy complaints; I've got no issue with another creator attempting to tell a story using Martin's characters, especially if Martin doesn't take exception to it.  Killing off characters who have survived in the books, or rewriting or simplifying the relationship between characters in order to condense plotlines that Martin has stretched out over several texts doesn't trouble me any either.  The television show Game of Thrones and The Song of Fire and Ice books have always existed as separate cultural artifacts for me, one a dense rendering of interlocking plotlines, the other a meandering consideration of various cultures and characters in the mold of Tolkien.  No, my issues exist with the construction of Game of Thrones' female characters, especially with regard to their characterization and agency.

Trouble has been brewing for a while on this front, but in the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, "The Gift," it erupted in a cavalcade of ham-fisted misogyny as female characters who had spent seasons building up social agency and endurance were suddenly stripped of it.  Sansa Stark, whose transition from guileless damsel figure to socially fluent temptress occupied the entirety of her previous season, was suddenly rendered a sex object, bereft of any of the authority she'd been acquiring, robbed of any sort of ability to endure the violence visited upon her by her new husband, Ramsay Bolton (which, at least on screen, seems to consist primarily of normal sex that an old friend of hers has to watch).  Sansa, who had previously been used as a sort of wandering narrative lens, has been transformed into a victim, a victim whose suffering is at least partially projected on to a male bodied character, Theon Greyjoy, who she attempts to utilize as her only potential venue of agency.  Transformed into object, robbed of social power and internal complexity, Stark now persists only as a figurehead, a sort of rape-toy for a character that people generally disliked anyway.  That it happened in a way that dismantled any growth the character had previously experienced makes the most recent series of twists especially problematic.

This is far from the only misogynist dismissal of agency on display in "The Gift." In King's Landing nearly every female authority figure has suddenly been supplanted by a singular male religious figurehead, who emerged largely out of nowhere a few episodes ago and applies a dominant set of religious principles that represent a not-so-thinly-veiled critique of contemporary conservative Christian mentalities.  In the case of Olenna Tyrell this divorce from agency merely entailed being ignored by a male authority figure, perhaps in part because, as an older woman, Olenna's suffering would not titillate viewers the way that the suffering of younger, prettier female bodied characters would.  Cersei Lannister and Marjory Tyrell are not so lucky: they are imprisoned, their control over their own bodies wrested from them, in one case for permissive social behavior and the temerity to exhibit loyalty to a character outside the paradigm of the now dominant male authority structure (who, albeit, exists in a position of prominence in the previously dominant apparatus that runs parallel to those structures) and in one case for having the gall to exhibit sexual agency and self-determination in a way that violates social morays.  The realpolitik of King's Landing, wherein women and female-like figures previously held power and exercised authority over men who, while utterly capable of committing acts of violence to exert their power were incapable of navigating the complex social spheres of this exceptional urban environment, has shifted dramatically in only a handful of episodes.  Far from a den of sin, King's Landing is now a refuge for the pious, a revision that resembles fan-fiction in its utter disregard for what preceded it.  Now a group of men who exercise violence over all who disagree with them hold authority there.  It's a backwards step in both gender politics, and in quality of storytelling.

And then there's the attempted rape of Gilly that unfolds at The Wall.  The execution of the attempt is offensive enough, not for its presence (Gilly, after all, has been sexually victimized since she was born, and this is nothing new for her) but for its resolution: Samwell attempts to stop her rape, but only succeeds when the dire wolf Ghost, who effectively serves as a symbol of Jon Snow, Sam's more potent, more masculine friend, appears.  Thus rather than defining its characters or presenting them with an opportunity to change, the scene simply reinforces an existing power dynamic.  That in and of itself might not be quite so terrible, but what follows, where the victim of a rape attempt decides to sleep with her attempted savior rendered co-victim, is wince worthy for its blithe disregard for the reality of sexual agency, its reinforcement of misogynist archetypes, and its utter insensitivity to victims of sexual violence.  People who suffer a rape or an attempted rape tend to not want to climb into bed with the next available man, and having a character engage in such a practice strips her of any kind of internal life or visible internal logic as a character, transforming her into an object of male fantasy whose narrative objective is not to survive, as is usually the case in the world of Game of Thrones, or act as a mother or friend to a given character, as she had previously.  Instead she is set to act intermittently as an object of desire and as a potential recipient for threats, which in turn are thusly transformed into threats against her male counterpart, who is now something of her "owner" in the structure of narrative agency.  The label of fan-fiction remains apropos: Samwell Tarley, a perennial metaphoric bridesmaid in the world of Game of Thrones, deserved to get a little in the minds of Game of Thrones' writing staff.  The relationship between the two groups, the pale, intellectual Tarley and the predominantly white and male writing staff of Game of Thrones, is easy to establish, which in turn makes it all too easy to frame Tarley's sexual reward as a kind of wish fulfillment on the part of the writers.

Even Daenerys had a little bit of agency taken away from her, in the form of a little bite of pillow talk between her piece of man candy, Daario Naharis, who, until this point, had been a kind of sexualized body-object she utilized when she cared to and then removed from her presence with impunity, in a stark inversion of the gender politics typical to the show.  Naharis was suddenly made into a sort of romantic figure, a proper consort rather than object of passing desire.  To be fair, this could be a part of an attempt to build a sort of internal complexity into Naharis, who appears to be moving in to fill the void left by the death of Barristan Selmy, who survives to rule in Daenerys stead in the books, but even so it represents a step backward for Daenerys, who had previously exhibited the same sort of sexual agency and related disconnection that male characters in the world of Game of Thrones casually demonstrated in the past.  By heightening Daenerys' emotionality she is transformed into a stereotype, a notion echoed in the scenes that follow her romantic interlude where she is suddenly made visibly uncomfortable by violence, incongruous given her past experiences, and is socially detained by a man of lower political and social status in a situation that demands that she passively bear witness to acts of violence she desired to stop.  To cap it all off, she responds irrationally (just like a girl, right bro?) to the reintroduction of Jorah Mormont into her life, screaming and demanding he be removed after staring at him dreamily before.

I'm not even going to touch the Sand Snakes' "prettiest woman in the world" scene, which appears to have been tacked in so that we can see "how cray bitches be," or Brienne of Tarth's relative absence from the world, which removed the lone female-bodied character capable of male-level violence (partially because of her relatively de-sexed nature as a character) from a noticeably sexist narrative.  Suffice it to say, those scenes represented their own problems, and this rant has already gone on for quite a while.

Perhaps I'm being overly nitpicky here.  Perhaps I'm simply responding to a slight hiccough in what has until recently been one of the best shows on television, a show that realized the complex internal lives of characters that an author spent years constructing.  That's no mean feat in the world of television, where characters move fast, and plots move faster.  But, at least of late, Game of Thrones has flipped from being a smart, insightful consideration of feminist politics, violence against women, and the strategies that those characters use to overcome their subjugation, into a celebration of male authority and a dismissal of women as objects who need to be protected or threatened in order to motivate male characters, and require recognition as sexual objects in order to attain any kind of enduring screen time.  It is odd to say that chauvinism has come to Westeros, because it was certainly there before, but of late the power dynamic has shifted.  It is more proper to say, at least in the most recent episode of Game of Thrones, that chauvinism has become the dominant force in its storytelling.