WOMEN OF ICE AND FIRE

WOMEN OF ICE AND FIRE

Gender, Game of Thrones, and

Multiple Media Engagements

Edited by Anne Gjelsvik and Rikke Schubart

Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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First published 2016

© Anne Gjelsvik, Rikke Schubart and Contributors, 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gjelsvik, Anne, editor. | Schubart, Rikke, editor. Title: Women of ice and
fire : gender, Game of thrones and multiple media engagements / edited by Anne
Gjelsvik, Rikke Schubart. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015037181| ISBN
9781501302893 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501302909 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH:
Game of thrones (Television program) | Women heroes in mass media. | Women in
mass media. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Television / History & Criticism. | SOCIAL
SCIENCE / Gender Studies. Classification: LCC PN1992.77.G35 W86 2016 | DDC
791.45/72--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037181

ISBN: HB: 9781501302893

PB: 9781501302909
ePub: 9781501302923
ePDF: 9781501302916

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 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik 1

Chapter 1
ADAPTING SEX: CULTURAL CONCEPTIONS OF SEXUALITY IN
WORDS AND IMAGES
Mariah Larsson 17

Chapter 2
ADAPTING DESIRE: WIVES, PROSTITUTES, AND SMALLFOLK
Shannon Wells-Lassagne 39

Chapter 3
UNSPEAKABLE ACTS OF (SEXUAL) TERROR AS/IN QUALITY
TELEVISION
Anne Gjelsvik 57

Chapter 4
SWORN SWORDS AND NOBLE LADIES: FEMALE CHARACTERS IN
GAME OF THRONES VIDEO GAMES
Felix Schröter 79

Chapter 5
WOMAN WITH DRAGONS: DAENERYS, PRIDE, AND POSTFEMINIST
POSSIBILITIES
Rikke Schubart 105

Chapter 6
POWER PLAY AND FAMILY TIES: HYBRID FANTASY, NETWORK
NARRATIVE, AND FEMALE CHARACTERS
Helle Kannik Haastrup 131

Chapter 7
“MAIDEN, MOTHER, AND CRONE”: MOTHERHOOD IN THE
WORLD OF ICE AND FIRE
Marta Eidsvåg 151
vi Contents

Chapter 8
WOMEN WARRIORS FROM CHIVALRY TO VENGEANCE
Yvonne Tasker and Lindsay Steenberg 171

Chapter 9
FEMALE MACHIAVELLIANS IN WESTEROS
Elizabeth Beaton 193

Chapter 10
THE EXPERT FEMALE FAN RECAP ON YOUTUBE
Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup 219

Chapter 11
“I’M NOT GOING TO FIGHT THEM, I’M GOING TO FUCK
THEM”: SEXIST LIBERALISM AND GENDER (A)POLITICS IN GAME
OF THRONES
Stéphanie Genz 243

About the Contributors 267

Index 271
 I N T R O DU C T IO N
Rikke Schubart and Anne Gjelsvik

George Stroumboulopoulos: “There’s one thing that’s interesting about

your books. I noticed that you write women really well and really
different. Where does that come from?”
George R. R. Martin: “You know, I’ve always considered women to
be people.”1
Key Questions

With his bestselling book series, A Song of Ice and Fire (1996–), George R. R.
Martin has been credited with changing the status of fantasy from geek culture
to mainstream box office, from a light and utopian genre to a grim, dark, and
dystopian place, and from attracting not only men, but also women. His book
series grew into a transglobal media, what we, here, refer to as the “transmedia
GoT universe”. This includes the books and their adaptation into the HBO
TV series Game of Thrones (2011–), wikis, various online fan activities, and
computer games.2
While there are, surely, many explanations for this success, in Women of Ice
and Fire we focus on Martin’s female characters who have generated praise,
intense attention and fascination, heated debate, controversy, and have been
read as both feminist and antifeminist, as subversive and repressive, and,
coined in the discussion of the TV series, as tools for “sexploitation”.
Female characters are, we think, key to the originality and, thus, to the
appeal and popularity of the GoT universe. Our anthology lays out two
tracks that are intertwined: We examine the female characters in GoT, and
we focus on how women operate in the transmedial GoT universe. Thus, our
anthology explores the female characters of GoT, and how a transmedial
GoT is inhabited and used by women, both fictional characters and real
women.
As mentioned, there are many ways in which Martin’s book series is unique,
one being that it offers more than thirty first-person narrators, of which
half are women, and several of those are central protagonists and potential
candidates for the fought-over Iron Throne. Women are everywhere—as
2 Women of Ice and Fire

protagonists, side characters, and smallfolk (Martin’s term for peasantry and
common folk)—and we find all kinds of stereotypes. Here are the fair Princess
Daenerys, who can survive fire and has three dragons, the scheming and evil
Queen Cersei, a passionate Lady Catelyn, the ambitious Red Witch Melisandre,
vengeful tomboy Arya, romantic teen Sansa, chivalric knight Brienne, clever
prostitute Ros, and many others who are not run-of-the-mill fantasy women,
but rather complex, multi-faceted, intriguing, and highly engaging characters.
The overall plot in GoT is a battle for the Iron Throne. Here, female
characters are as ambitious, active, and able as men. However, how they
navigate their world is a matter of narrative, of author decisions, of television
producers’ calculation in audiences and commercial strategies, of game
producers’ choice of design, and of users and fans’ interactions with the
various media forms. In the transmedial GoT especially, representations of
sex and violence and sexualized violence have proven both provocative and
problematic. In Season 1, one scene which raised a cacophony of protests was
when Drogo had sex with his teenage bride, Daenerys, on their wedding night.
It led a feminist blogger to comment: “The beautiful setting and soft music is a
subliminal cue … you give when the romantic leads are about to kiss and fully
recognize their passion for one another. In this scene, those cues are perverted
with a message that rape is romantic, rape is love.”3
On the other hand, author and editor Caroline Spector, writing about the
same events in the TV series and books, states, “the canard of the woman
who falls in love with her rapist is extremely difficult to overcome … [yet] by
creating such diverse and fully rendered female characters and thrusting them
into this grim and bitter world, Martin has created a subversively feminist tale”.4
The contributors to the present volume disagree, as do audiences, about how
to see women in GoT. Are they feminist characters, or a perversion of feminism?
Is this postfeminist entertainment for a neoliberal age? Is it a backlash dressed
up in prefeminist medieval clothes (which often has naked women in the
background of exposition or dramatic action)? Or is Martin a feminist, as he
claims,5 and these women, then, the role models in a complex and conflicted
contemporary world that has abandoned utopian illusions and in which fantasy
is transformed from light to dark and from the ethically simple to conflicted?
Whether you find the women in GoT subversive, repressive, or ambiguously
mixed, they are more than mere spectacle. In the episode “You Win or You
Die” (1.07), Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) warns Lord Ned Stark (Sean Bean)
that, “when you play the game of thrones, you win or you die”. And Daenerys
(Emilia Clarke) warns an abusive brother that, “the next time you raise a hand
to me will be the last time you have hands” (1.04). These are not empty threats.
Cersei and Daenerys’s passionate approach to men and politics is shared by
other female characters and by audiences (and here we include fans, critics,
and academics). Women of Ice and Fire explores this passionate engagement in
the hope of both carving out new roads in the gendered terrain of GoT, and
also mapping new territory in women’s engagement with transmedial fantasy.
 Introduction 3

Figure 1: “Mother of Dragons.” Original artwork of Daenerys and her three dragons in
A Song of Ice and Fire by Uruguayan artist Yama Orce.

Context

Today, the size and appeal of GoT is overwhelming. Thus, when Season 5
premiered, in April 2015, and four episodes were leaked onto the Internet, these
counted for eight out of the ten most popular torrents for illegal downloads.6
Through HBO’s adaptation, active websites like Westeros.org, Winteriscoming.
net, and Watchersonthewall.com, comic book adaptations, computer games,
memes and wikis, and a growing body of fan fiction, Martin’s book series has
become probably the most popular transmedial fantasy world yet seen.
However, to begin with the series, A Song of Ice and Fire, was no bestseller.
It started as a single book, A Game of Thrones (1996), which, as Martin has
written, he decided should be a trilogy. After finishing the second book, A
Clash of Kings (1998), he decided that the trilogy should become a quintet—A
Storm of Swords (2000), A Feast for Crows (2005), and A Dance with Dragons
(2011). Along the way, the quintet evolved into the now awaited seven-book
series, with The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring ending it. At the time
of writing (September 2015) the saga nears 6,000 pages and has 1,000 named
characters.
The first book, A Game of Thrones, was published in only a few thousand
copies in the US, and UK publisher HarperCollins’ edition a mere 1,500
copies.7 Not until the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, did the series reach the
New York Times bestseller list in 2005, and, in 2011, the fifth (and latest) book,
A Dance with Dragons, sold 298,000 copies on its first day of publication.
Today, Martin’s saga has sold more than 58 million copies across the five titles
globally.
In 2007, HBO started developing the fantasy television series Game of
Thrones, which premiered in 2011. It is planned to run for eight seasons. Game
4 Women of Ice and Fire

of Thrones fits well with HBO’s other series, known for fascinating and complex
characters within a frame that now is usually referred to as the “new golden
age of television”. HBO has been an important player in the development of
critically acclaimed quality television series since the 1970s. Notable bench-
marks of influential drama series are The Sopranos (1991–2007) and The Wire
(2002–8).
However, HBO has received a lot of criticism for the portrayal of women in
its shows, in particular when it comes to nudity, sex scenes, and prostitution.
It has also been hard to find female protagonists as complex and interesting as
male figures such as Tony Soprano or Jimmy McNulty. This has led television
scholars Kim Akass and Jan McCabe to ask the question: “What has HBO ever
done for women?”8 Their answer, however, is: quite a lot. In an age of cultural
ambivalence when it comes to emancipation, female identity, feminism, and
postfeminism, HBO has created individual characters reflecting “the contra-
dictions we all live with each and every day”, Akass and McCabe argue.9 The
controversies surrounding Game of Thrones, as well as its success, is, to a large
degree, the result of HBO’s position in popular media culture.
Albeit a fantasy series for adults, Game of Thrones became an instant
prize-winning success, as shown by U.S. audience figures, which have grown
from 2.2 million at the premiere of first season to reach 3 million in Season 1,
4 million at the end of Season 2, 5 million in mid-Season 3, and 5.39 million at
the end of the season. At the end of Season 4, audience figures were more than
7 million and more than 8 million people watched the premiere of Season 5 in
2015,10 and the Season 5 finale had 8.11 million viewers and generated no less
than 437,000 Tweets. As numbers indicate, the GoT phenomenon is unique
in its popularity. As such, it is influential and is especially interesting, in our
opinion, when it comes to the question of gender.
Both the television and book series, Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice
and Fire, respectively, have passionate fans. Also, individual characters have
dedicated followers who love some characters and love to hate others. Queen
mother Cercei, a favorite character for fans to despise, has, for instance, received
a lot of attention on different Internet forums.11 GoT fans are numerous and
dedicated: some fans even have names, such as those who complain that Martin
can’t ever finish his novels soon enough, who are nicknamed “GRRuMblers”.
Different fan groups have created wikis, forums, podcasts, and review practices
that count a large number of followers and fans in their own right, and the
topic of gender is central to many of the debates and reviews on these platforms
(see Tosca and Klastrup, Chapter 10). And since GoT is typical of our current
media environment in transcending borders between media, we investigate
gender in GoT from multiple media perspectives that include asking questions
of adaptation and fan reception.12
 Introduction 5

Genre

George R. R. Martin has been called an American J. R. R. Tolkien, and A Song

of Ice and Fire has been proclaimed fantasy on a par with Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings trilogy.
Martin’s story takes place in an alternate world in which the Seven Kingdoms
of Westeros are ruled from the Iron Throne in the city of King’s Landing. In
the beginning, the ruling king, Robert Baratheon, is murdered, and war breaks
out in Westeros, spreading to neighbor realms and continents. Families fight
each other in the so-called “game of thrones”, employing Machiavellian politics,
and methods of torture, murder, and massacre. The Lannister family—which
includes Queen Cersei, her twin brother, Jaime, their father, Tywin, and dwarf
brother, Tyrion—are cast as villains, and the Stark family—Ned and Catelyn, and
their children, Robb, Sansa, Arya, Brandon, Rickon, and the bastard Jon Snow—
are the “good guys”. However, nothing is simple in Martin’s world. Magical
beings, previously thought long extinct, now return, and among them are old
gods, and dragons, white walkers (a race of undead warriors), and wights (reani-
mated dead humans) from beyond the Wall in the North. Black magic is rife.
The popularity of Martin’s (and subsequently HBO’s) epic has been explained
by his original take on high fantasy, a genre traditionally set in a secondary
world full of adventure, supernatural elements (such as magic, monsters,
witches, and wizards), a hero’s quest, or coming-of-age story, and, perhaps
most importantly, a utopian spirit shared with the fairy tale.
In The Fantasy Film (2010), Katherine Fowkes writes that, “as a rule, fantasy
tends to favor happy endings, and eschews not only tragedy, but cynicism,
providing solace and redemption in a world of evil and violence”.13 It is this
naive quality of fantasy that Marxist Ernst Bloch (1930) saw as enlightening:
“[C]onsider yourself as born free and entitled to be totally happy, dare to make
use of your power of reasoning, look upon the outcome of things as friendly.”14
Bloch found social hope in fantasy, where “the little guy” could become a
king. It was the same hope that Tolkien expressed in his famous essay “On
Fairy-Stories” (1937–49) as central to the fantasy genre, where death and
disaster is avoided by “the sudden joyous ‘turn’” which jolts the narrative from
dyscatastrophe to eucatastrophe, the latter being Tolkien’s coinage of “the joy of
deliverance”.15
We experience this joy when an evil world, against all the odds, turns out
to become good after all. For the Catholic Tolkien, writing during the Second
World War, fantasy was an evangelium that delivered escape, consolation, and
recovery from a world where the human imagination was entrapped.16 Finally,
in the fantasy genre characters are often stereotypes in the sense that they do
not change very much. Thus, Aragon in Lord of the Rings may turn out to be
king, a timid hobbit may even prove heroic, however, orcs do not become brave
men, and men, elves, and hobbits do not become evil orcs (except, perhaps, for
Gollum …).17
6 Women of Ice and Fire

In contrast, Martin’s high fantasy comes with multiple twists, taking

traditional genre conventions and tropes, and expanding, playing with, and
subverting them. Thus, Martin draws on both social realism and historical
fiction, turning his genre writing into pitch-black fantasy, which holds torture,
terror, sexual abuse, murder, and suffering; elements that are accentuated and
expanded in the HBO adaptation, as our contributors point out. Dark fantasy
is commonly understood as fantasy with a horror-like atmosphere, or horror
with supernatural elements. Here, however, “darkness” is in excruciating
realism, in the numerous, overwhelming facts and details, and the undeterred
focus on pain, pathological behavior, and death. Also, rather than solely
focusing on noble lords and ladies, Martin includes smallfolks and numerous
prostitutes, and pursues the long-term effect of war on a people.18 Daenerys
may free slaves, but when she is a ruling queen she learns that it is impossible
to force freedom on a people, and even more impossible to rule with her heart
in a time of war. Martin has criticized fellow fantasy writers for creating “a sort
of Disneyland middle ages, where they had castles and princesses and all that.
The trappings of a class system, but they didn’t seem to understand what a class
system actually meant”.19 To Martin, clearly, a class system means violence, war,
and death.
Embedded in Martin’s fantasy are also the genres and styles of the fairy tale,
adventure, Arthurian legends, and the medieval romance, and the melodrama
with its heightened emotional feeling that every character and every element
“build-up the sense of a whole world bearing out the audience’s traditional
patterns of right and wrong, good and evil”.20
Just as melodrama can have tragic ends, so can Martin’s epic. Especially
since yet another genre thread in his literary carpet is historical fiction inspired
by the English War of the Roses, fought from 1421 to 1487. Thus, the Lannisters
have been read for the Lancasters, the Starks for the Yorks, and the Tyrells for
the Tudors;21 and Daenerys has been seen as a “victorious” Henry VII.
Speculations abound among fans as to how Martin’s characters will fare and
who might end on the Iron Throne. With the “darker” genres of melodrama
and historical fiction come characters with psychological depth. Thus, although
few characters are pure evil (such as torturer Ramsay Bolton), and fewer still
pure good (Ned Stark tried to rule with the people in mind), most are flawed,
mixing good and bad traits into scales of grey. Queen Cersei may be incestuous
and vengeful, but she is also a devoted mother, and Catelyn Stark may be a
devoted mother, but she is also a hateful stepmother to Jon Snow, and a fallible
political advisor to her son Robb, when he is King of the North.22
A Song of Ice and Fire is, essentially, a grand and global war narrative, and
Martin’s story takes surprising turns, leaving every character vulnerable to the
dyscatastrophe of death and disaster. By book five, there is still no joyous end
in sight, no simple Manichean morality, but rather an ambiguous blend of good
and bad deeds, choices, and acts. Daenerys’s freed slaves become murderers.
The morally just are executed. Children become victims of war. Women are
 Introduction 7

beaten, abused, and raped, including the innocent, young, and beautiful. Men
are mutilated, tortured, and castrated.
This, then, is the pitch-black fantasy world that women inhabit, too.

Gender, Sex, and Politics

Caroline Spector, in “Power and Feminism in Westeros”, draws attention

to the fact that “a powerful point about the dangers inherent in fantasy [is]
how fanciful myths hide—and perpetuate—a fundamentally oppressive social
structure”.23 A female fantasy hero was once considered “female exception-
alism”,24 and female autonomy seen as “the real fantasy” of fantasy.25 Today,
however, the centrality of the female fantasy hero is not questioned.26 “The
real fantasy” in GoT is not female autonomy, but any autonomy, be it male
or female. No, the heated debate is not over female characters’ visibility or
agency, but instead over how these factors are interwoven with sex, sexualized
violence, and nudity. Thus, female characters are visible, yet embedded in
carnal politics, or as Stéphanie Genz, one of our contributors, calls it, “fuck
politics”. Oppressive social structures are made explicit—but are they still
perpetuated?
When Martin created his female characters, he took inspiration from the
European medieval age, during which royal marriages were political, and
women used as pawns.27 However, they could be political players too. Thus,
Lucrezia Borgia was married strategically for the third time in 1502, and
became known for her Machiavellian scheming. She survived the fall of the
dynastically important Borgias, and Anne Boleyn, a member of the Norfolk
family, convinced Henry VIII of England to divorce his first wife, Katherine of
Aragon, so that he could marry her, causing a break with Rome and setting off
events that led to the establishment of the Church of England. These historical
women have inspired Westerosi politics: Queen Cersei rules behind her sons
Joffrey and Tommen, and Lady Catelyn promises her son, Robb, in marriage to
the Freys, in exchange for their martial help. When the latter promise is broken
it leads to Robb’s death at the infamous Red Wedding, a fact that left audiences
in tears and made headline news.
To be a noble woman means to have a stake in the game of thrones. “I don’t
want to be a Lady”, says Arya in Season 1, before she becomes an orphan. “I
could never understand why they treated us differently,” Cersei complains
about her and her brother. “Jaime was taught to fight with sword and lance and
mace, and I was taught to smile and sing and please. He was heir to Casterly
Rock and I was sold to some stranger like a horse to be ridden whenever he
desired” (2.09). Similarly, when Daenerys sees Drogo, she protests, “I don’t
want to be his queen.” Yet, her brother Viserys doesn’t care: “I’d let his whole
khalasar fuck you if need be, sweet sister, all 40,000 men, and their horses,
8 Women of Ice and Fire

too, if that was what it took to get my army.”28 (See Chapter 5, Schubart, for
further discussion of this.) Later, when she needs allies and is queen, Danerys
sells herself in marriage. And Sansa, in Season 5, accepts Petyr’s advice to
marry torturer Ramsay Bolton, who will soon be killed, predicts Petyr, and
Sansa, then, will become the Warden of the North. Thus, women learn to trade
themselves (but men too, we must keep in mind, are sold like horses, and Robb
pays with his life).
In GoT’s transmedial perspective, sex is controversial in more ways than
its use in medieval politics. A Song of Ice and Fire takes place in a world
with brothels, rapes, incest, and sexual torture, where girls and women,
noble, peasant, and prostitute, are rapable. Abuse and violence are, thus, an
integrated part of the sexual politics of A Song of Ice and Fire. And, when
the book series was adapted into HBO’s Game of Thrones, the carnal sex
politics became, some critics argue, the “fuck politics” and strategy to gain
audience appeal. HBO’s staging of naked women having sex (if not in the
foreground, then in the background), while male characters offer information
(exposition) was coined as “sexposition”, in 2011, by blogger Myles McNutt,
a neologism instantly picked up by the media and applied in retrospect to
other HBO shows, and to its gender politics in general.29 Neil Marshall, the
director of the episode “Blackwater” (2.09) was urged by producers to make
his characters “go full-frontal”, which Marshall described as a “pretty surreal”
experience.30
Adapting sex and sexual politics from words to images has proven both
controversial and problematic in several ways. One issue was to do with who
exactly was allowed to be naked: thus, some female characters are shown with
full-frontal nudity, while there is no full-frontal male nudity.31 Also, in the
books, some female characters are described as naked in certain scenes, but
when converting words into images were changed into dressed women, thus
altering the various functions that nudity serves in the books. For example,
Eidsvåg discusses how mothers Cersei and Catelyn are described as naked
during certain events in the books, but are portrayed dressed in corresponding
scenes in the show. Another issue concerns changes in the representation of
sex, violence, and politics, which finds different expressions; one is that nudity
and sex are inserted into scenes of violence and torture (an issue Gjelsvik
explores in her examination of Theon’s sufferings at the hands of Ramsay).
And, in other cases, consensual sex is changed into rape, such as on Daenerys’s
wedding night with Drogo in Season 1, or Jaime having sex with his sister next
to their son’s coffin in Season 4.
And then, of course, age is a concern when adapting any story from books
to mainstream television, because the children and the teenage protagonists
are considered too young to act on the small screen in the same way that they
can do in books. Thus, Daenerys is thirteen years old in the books at time of
marriage, but fifteen in the HBO adaptation (and, in fact, is played by twenty-
four-year old Emilia Clarke). Similarly, eleven-year old Sansa is made thirteen
 Introduction 9

in the HBO version, when she is King Joffrey’s fiancée, and he has her beaten in
public. Arya is aged from nine to eleven, when she watches her father, Ned Stark,
being publicly beheaded; and Daenerys’s scribe, Missandei, changes from being
ten in the books to a young woman on screen (played by twenty-three-year
old Nathalie Emmanuel). Thus, children become “tweens” or teens, and teens
are themselves played by young women, so the provocative and problematic
elements of sex and violence can be made more palatable to television audiences.
GoT’s sexposition and “fuck politics” have been received in various ways.
The recurring use of nudity is often gratuitous and titillating, and when
coupled with torture and murder, appears both highly provocative and also
is seen by audiences as “too much”. Case in point, when child-king Joffrey
Baratheon sexually tortures and kills prostitutes.
The differing receptions and evaluations of the gender politics of GoT have
several explanations, which involve not just the above mentioned complexity
and genre hybridity, weaving together historical fiction, fantasy, and social
realism, but also questions of adaptation, and of audiences’ transmedial
knowledge. Thus, as the contribution in this book by Tosca and Klastrup
shows, audiences who have read the books were not troubled by the rape
scenes in the HBO show, but rather saw the HBO show as having altered the
scenes in the books.
Martin has said of his gender politics: “I try to reflect a whole spectrum
of humanity as best I can.”32 And the actors of Game of Thrones have, in
interviews, underlined the story’s feminist potential, rather than its possible
sexploitation aspects. “When you put it into perspective and look at what
these women have accomplished and what they are capable of doing against
all odds, I definitely think it’s empowering,” says actress Emilia Clarke, who
plays Daenerys.33
Opinions differ as to whether GoT exposes or exploits women, and
many (among them some of our contributors), remain conflicted in their
engagement with the female characters. We take this conflict as a sign that the
women in GoT are psychologically complex, sexually transgressive, ideologi-
cally ambiguous, and intimately grounded in human emotions. And we have
not seen it as our aim here to solve such disputes by providing clear cut or
singular readings but, conversely, we hope to open up the contested terrain of
women in GoT and our engagement with them.

Women of Ice and Fire

Our anthology explores women in a transmedia GoT universe that includes

Martin’s book series, the HBO show, computer games, and online activ-
ities. Drawing from studies in gender, film and television, and new media,
the contributors investigate gender in relation to female characters; genre;
10 Women of Ice and Fire

representations of sex, violence, and politics; choices of adaptation; and female

audience engagement. We address representations of female characters as
types and stereotypes and ask what is altered when storytelling moves between
media, and how these alterations affect gender, and the representations of
female characters.
Sex creates engagement and, in her contribution, Swedish film scholar
Mariah Larsson discusses both historical perspectives on, and contemporary
ideas about sex, love, and marriage, and how these all influence the adaptation
of sex from word to image. Larsson analyzes the marriages of some of the
primary contenders for the Iron Throne: Sansa Stark and Tyrion Lannister,
Daenerys Targaryen and Khal Drogo, and Robb Stark and Talisa Maegyr. In
Western culture, sexuality is a social and cultural construct which determines
how, why, when, and with whom we have sex. Larsson elaborates on how sexual
positions reflect different ideas about true love, virginity, and innocence. The
adaptation, she argues, extrapolates the binary between the “modern, equal,
and recognizable” and the “fantasy–historical, horrific, and alien”, making for
an ambiguous entertainment that may influence how we think about sex and
marriage.
George R. R. Martin has been recognized for his attention to “smallfolk”,
and the impact of the political maneuverings of the ruling classes on their lives.
French literature and adaptation scholar Shannon Wells-Lassagne examines the
female characters Ros and Talisa who were specifically created by showrunners
and writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss for HBO, in order to give recurring
faces to some of the hundreds of minor female characters described in the
books. These women function in different ways: where Ros condenses the
books’ many prostitutes into a single character, Talisa replaces and expands
the book character Jeyne, who marries Robb, only to disappear after his death.
Wells-Lassagne argues that these two characters become proxies for smallfolk
women in the HBO series, making the latter not just more commercial,
but also more political. By adding these two characters, the show heightens
our engagement with smallfolk, and also strengthens our empathy with the
powerless.
Sex and violence are central in the game for power in both the book series
and the HBO show. However, in the HBO adaptation, several alterations and
additions are quite remarkable. Norwegian film and television scholar Anne
Gjelsvik discusses how certain changes between the book and the TV series
alter perspectives on gender and power on a narrative and discursive level to
create sexual victimization. She bases her discussion on, first, the reception
of the series, and, second, on close readings of three episodes (two directed
by the only female director on the production, Michelle MacLaren), with
scenes featuring rape or torture: the torture of Theon (3.07), the threat of rape
against Meera Reed (4.05), and Jaime’s rape of his sister, Queen Cersei (4.03).
In the latter scene, the alterations from book to show were so fundamental
that Martin apologized if people found the scene disturbing for “the wrong
 Introduction 11

reasons”. Drawing on adaptation and medium specificity theories, on recent

discussions of quality television, and on both fans’ and critics’ reactions,
Gjelsvik shows why these specific scenes were seen as “too much”.
In the contribution of German computer game scholar Felix Schröter, the
use of GoT’s female characters in the medium of computer games is explored.
At the time of writing, there are four licensed games: the adventure Game Of
Thrones (Telltale 2014/15), the real-time strategy A Game of Thrones: Genesis
(Cyanide/Focus Home Interactive 2011), the action/role-playing Game of
Thrones (Atlus/Focus Home Interactive 2012), and the Facebook Game of
Thrones Ascent (Disruptor Beam 2013). Using the concepts of mythos (story),
ethos (morals), and topos (world), Schröter shows how the last three games
differ in their integration of female characters into game mechanics. Thus,
in the role-playing Game of Thrones there are no playable female characters;
in the strategy game, women become de-individualized “commodities”, and
in the Facebook game, they are gender-neutral game pieces (since male and
female game pieces have exactly the same qualities). Thus, the computer games
retain little of the original complexity in their use of female GoT characters,
but, conversely, adhere to a conservative gender logic where action-games
are designed with male players in mind and social games with female players
in mind.
Danish film scholar Rikke Schubart starts from the point of her own
excitement at watching teenager Daenerys rise from the ashes and become a
mother of dragons. Fiction can serve as an arena for experimentation and play,
Schubart argues, and she shows how Daenerys transforms into a subversive
fantasy hero both in Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones and in Season 1 of
HBO’s series. Drawing on cognitive theory, emotions studies, postfeminism,
and fairy tale studies, Schubart demonstrates how the emotion of pride is
central to making Daenerys a strong contender for the Iron Throne. Fantasy,
says Schubart, unites myth, melodrama, and the fairy tale, and Daenerys
combines traits from Campbell’s universal hero (coming-of-age), the fairy tale
hero (adventure and magical helpers) and the fairy tale heroine (marriage).
Daenerys faces three trials in her confrontations with her brother, Viserys, her
husband, Drogo, and the witch, Mirri Maz Duur. But where women in fairy
tales are usually victimized and domesticated, Daenerys ends up with magical
powers, queenhood, and dragons.
How does narrative structure and genre then influence how we engage
with female protagonists? In “Power Play and Family Ties: Hybrid Fantasy,
Network Narrative, and Female characters”, Danish film and television scholar
Helle Kannik Haastrup situates the HBO series in the present golden age of
complex quality television drama, and draws on theories of network narratives,
televisual storytelling, and genre to investigate how different genre formulae
are twisted and interwoven in Martin’s epic saga about power and family.
Using the eventful episode “The Children” (4.10) as her primary example,
Haastrup investigates the parallels and differences of male and female power
12 Women of Ice and Fire

in a universe in which men and women alike can be seen as both flawed heroes
and complex characters.
A story without a hero has more room for the mother, argues Norwegian
writer Marta Eidsvåg in her article “Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Motherhood
in the World of Ice and Fire”, taking her departure from literary studies. This
is the case in Martin’s novels, where both mothers Catelyn Stark and Cersei
Lannister are important point-of-view characters and, accordingly, make for
interesting exceptions to the rule in fantasy literature that mothers are few
and far between. However, the transfer from literature to television radically
changes the depiction of motherhood, Eidsvåg argues. In portraying these
mothers, HBO has chosen, unlike in most other aspects of their adaptation,
to downplay controversial content, and taboos such as sex and abortion. The
Cersei on television is more maternal and less monstrous, while Catelyn is
transformed from a wise and strong woman into a more passive character.
While violent women have become increasingly visible in contemporary
popular culture, they are still an exception to the rule. Women warriors
usually have limited powers at their disposal, for instance either masculinity or
sexuality, but in Game of Thrones, the range of possibilities seems more wide.
In “Women Warriors From Chivalry to Vengeance”, British film and television
scholars Yvonne Tasker and Lindsay Steenberg explore three types of female
fighters in the television series: warriors, cross-dressers, and military leaders,
as represented by the characters Arya, Brienne, Yara, and Daenerys. While
these female characters defy easy categorization within popular genre, the
television series still falls back on stereotypes that the authors find problematic,
hybrid, and troubling, such as the vengeful tomboy, the anachronistic female
knight, and the messianic leader.
Our last three articles shift focus from the fictional GoT universe to look at
gender in relation to politics and audiences. Politics is understood as cultural
and real, and contributors use postfeminist theory, political theory, and new
media theory.
Australian literary scholar Elizabeth Beaton examines Machiavellian strat-
egies used by female characters in the book series and the HBO show.
Machiavelli’s The Prince (1532), a Renaissance treatise providing advice on
governing a principality, is infamous for its pragmatic instruction. With its
turbulent political and dynastic struggles, Westeros mirrors Machiavelli’s
Renaissance Italy, and the Westerosi women employ Machiavellian strategies.
Beaton examines Machiavellian moments on Game of Thrones, featuring
Cersei, Daenerys, and Yara (who in the novel is called Asha) Greyjoy.
Exploring the idea that Machiavellian strategies empower female characters,
she examines their military forays and political maneuvers. How does the
show’s visuals demonstrate the success of female Machiavellian princes (the
term “prince” meaning any ruler of a state)? And do Cersei, Yara, and Daenerys
leave themselves open to difficulties in later political endeavors by exhibiting
bold and ruthless behavior? Beaton combines close analysis of select scenes
 Introduction 13

from Seasons 1, 3, and 4 with text sections of A Song of Ice and Fire, and draws
on Machiavelli’s The Prince, as well as on interviews (including her own) with
author Martin.
Next is the contribution by Spanish Susana Tosca and Danish Lisbeth
Klastrup, both new media scholars, on female fan expert reviews on YouTube.
The review genre is popular on YouTube, where fans and users of all kinds of
products comment on their experiences. In the GoT review, the fan reviewer
comments on the latest episode of the show. Some review channels have a huge
following, with single episodes viewed by over a million fans (for example, the
channel of Comicbookgirl 19). These fan experts become “YouTube stars” who
breach the professional and amateur divide. Tosca and Klastrup characterize
the fan review, a genre previously unnoticed by academics, and relate it to older
media reviews in television and newspapers, before discussing how female
fan reviewers perform and stage themselves as experts on GoT. They analyze
whether women are more or less active than men, if female fan reviewers
comment on different themes than men, and they examine the relation
between gender and the fan’s knowledge of the GoT universe. How do other
fans respond to a female expert? And which forms of authority come into play
in the reception of these reviews? Klastrup and Tosca combine content analysis
of a select number of YouTube fan reviews, with in-depth interviews with the
fan experts.
Ending the anthology on a more apprehensive key is British gender scholar
Stéphanie Genz, who finds that the carnal and visceral gender politics of the
HBO series belies gender equality and sexual freedom. She argues that the
early twentieth-first century is both characterized by a sexualization of Western
culture, and also a mainstreaming of pornography. Such sexualized aesthetics
are linked to ideas of postfeminist empowerment and neoliberal agency;
however, rhetoric of empowerment is problematized in a recession by social
conflicts and political controversies. Today’s cultural climate has a complex
relation to gender, with fears about “the end of men” and “the rise of women”, as
argued recently by journalist Hanna Rosin.34 With its pseudo-medieval setting
and patriarchal structure, Game of Thrones is in line with historical drama
series like The Borgias and The Tudors which also use sexual licentiousness
and aggressive physicality. This fictive past, argues Genz, has the immediacy
of a time stripped of social coherence. Caught in contradictory political forces,
women’s principal resources are fertility and sexuality, and “fucking” becomes
a survival strategy and a carnal tactic with which to negotiate the exploitation
in Westeros. The liberal sexism—and sexist liberalism—reminds us that
“Winter is coming”, and it may be a while before Daenerys, Cersei, Sansa, Arya,
and the rest can change history.
But where it comes to fiction, the women of Westeros have already changed
history by making the transmedia GoT universe a uniquely popular and
engaging fantasy world where women take the lead.
14 Women of Ice and Fire

Notes

  1. On George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight, March 13, 2012, available online: https://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3Guf-T3U1U&feature=youtu.be (accessed April 20,
2015).
  2. See, for instance, Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca, “Transmedial Worlds—
Rethinking Cyberworld Design.” In Proceedings of the 2004 International
Conference on Cyberworlds, 2004, 409–16. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer
Society, available online: http://www.itu.dk/people/klastrup/klastruptosca_
transworlds.pdf (accessed September 1, 2015).
  3. “Daenery’s Wedding Night, or This is Not a Rape Scene,” blog entry by ElegantPI,
April 25, 2011, available online: http://elegantpi.dreamwidth.org/747684.html
(accessed February 15, 2013).
  4. Caroline Spector, “Power and Feminism in Westeros,” in Beyond the Wall:
Exploring George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, ed. James Lowder (Dallas:
BenBella Books, 2012), first part of this quote is location 2715, second part of the
quote is location 2757.
  5. Jessica Salter, “Game of Thrones’s George R. R. Martin: ‘I’m a Feminist at
Heart,’” interview, available online: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/
womens-life/9959063/Game-of-Throness-George-RR-Martin-Im-a-feminist.html
(accessed April 18, 2015).
  6. David Gilbert, “Game of Thrones Season 5: Millions Download Pirated Copies of
Opening 4 Episode. “According to the torrent tracker service Demonii, of the top
10 most popular torrents online at the moment, eight of them are illegal copies of
Game of Thrones episodes from Season 5,” available online: http://www.ibtimes.
co.uk/game-thrones-season-5-millions-download-pirated-copies-opening-four-
episodes–1496048 (accessed April 15, 2015).
  7. See John Jos. Miller, “Collecting Ice and Fire in the Age of Nook and Kindle” for
a history of the book series’ print history, in Beyond the Wall: Exploring George
R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance With
Dragons, ed. (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2012), Kindle edition.
  8. When it comes to representation of women, few, if any, series have been as
important as Sex and the City (1998–2004) for which HBO was accused of
“killing feminism.” Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, “What Has HBO Ever Done
for Women?” in The Essensial HBO Reader, ed. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P.
Jones (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 303–14, 304.
  9. McCabe and Akass, “What Has HBO Ever Done,” 314.
10. The numbers for the five seasons are from Rick Kissell, “‘Game of Thrones’ Finale
Sets Ratings Record,” Variety, June 16, 2015, available online: http://variety.
com/2015/tv/news/game-of-thrones-finale-ratings-jon-snow-cersei–1201519719/
(accessed August 28, 2015). The 6.8 million figure is from Paul Tassi, “‘Game of
Thrones’ Season 5 Premiere Sets Ratings Record, Despite Episode Leak,” available
online: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/04/14/game-of-thrones-
season-5-premiere-sets-audience-record-despite-episode-leak/ (accessed April 16,
2015). Other sources say as high as 7.1 million viewers, see http://www.reuters.
com/article/2014/06/16/us-television-gameofthrones-idUSKBN0ER2N520140616
(accessed April 15, 2015). For a discussion of numbers of earlier Game of Thrones
 Introduction 15

seasons, see James Hibberd, “HBO talks Game of Thrones future: More than 7
seasons wanted,” Entertainment Weekly, March 11, 2015, available online: http://
www.ew.com/article/2015/03/11/game-thrones-end/article_2137333 (accessed
April 10, 2015).
11. See for instance Erin Whitney, “Cersei is officially the most hated character
on ‘Game of Thrones’” in The Huffington Post, available online: http://www.
huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/07/game-of-thrones-cersei_n_5280773.html
(accessed August 28, 2015), and interview with Lena Headey at Conan https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeuBm2CJF24 (accessed September 1, 2015).
12. Henry Jenkins formulated transmedia storytelling as “a process where integral
elements of a fiction gets dispersed systematically across multiple delivery
channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment
experience.” Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media
Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 95–6.
13. Katherine A. Fowkes, The Fantasy Film (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 6.
14. Ernst Bloch, “The Fairy Tale Moves on its Own in Time” (1930), quoted in
Jack Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales
(Lexington: University of Press of Kentucky, 2002 [1979]), 153.
15. Tolkien quoted in Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell, 162, 163.
16. For a discussion of Tolkien’s ideas on genre and monsters in relation to A Song
of Ice and Fire see Susan Johnston, “Grief Poignant as Joy: Dyscatastrophe and
Eucatastrophe in A Song of Ice and Fire,” Mythlore 31, no. 1/2 (2012): 133–54.
17. There are of course works by female fantasy writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin,
Kat Wilhelm, Sarah Monette Mélusine, Anne Bishop, and Jacqueline Carey.
However, fantasy is still dominated by male authors and male protagonists unless
we include horror/paranormal romance (for instance The Vampire Diaries book
and television series, books by L. J. Smith; and Twilight books and film series
with books by Stephenie Meyer) and science fiction (for instance The Hunger
Games book and film series, books by Suzanne Collins). See also Robin Anne
Reid, ed., Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volume One & Two (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 2009).
18. See Wells-Lassagne in this volume, pages 39–55.
19. Quoted in Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, eds, Mastering the Game of Thrones:
Essays on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Jefferson: McFarland,
2015), Kindle edition, location 87.
20. John G. Cawelti, Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1977), 45.
21. A reading supported by the fact that ambitious character Margaery Tyrell in
HBO’s version is played by actress Natalie Dormer, who played Anne Boleyn in
the historical drama The Tudors (Showtime, 2007–10).
22. See Eidsvåg on moterhood in this volume.
23. Spector, “Power and Feminism in Westeros,” location 2597.
24. Jane Tolmie, “Medievalism and the Fantasy Heroine,” Journal of Gender Studies
15, no. 2 (July 2006): 155–8.
25. Carol Clover, “Maiden Warriors and Other Sons,” Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 85, no. 1 (January 1986): 35–49.
26. See Tasker and Steenberg in this volume.
27. See Larsson on sex and marriage in this volume.
16 Women of Ice and Fire

28. George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire, Books One to Four: A Game of
Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, A Feast for Crows. Sydney:
HarperVoyager, 2011, Kindle edition, Daenerys’s first chapter, location 907.
29. See Wells- Lassagne in this volume for a different take on this, see pages 39–55.
30. See Gjelsvik in this volume for a discussion of sex added to violence, see pages
57–78. For sexposition, see wikipedia, available online: http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Sexposition (accessed April 18, 2015).
31. Generating a lot of attention on the Internet, such as Kevin Bacon’s video
campaign “Free the Bacon”.
32. Martin quoted in Battis and Johnston, Mastering, location 204.
33. Clarke quoted in Valerie Estelle Frankel, Women in Game of Thrones: Power,
Conformity and Resistance (Jefferson: McFarland, 2014), Kindle edition,
location 23.
34. See Hanna Rosin, “The End of Men,” available online: http://www.theatlantic.
com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/ (accessed April 20,
2015).

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Martin, George R. R. A Dance With Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, book 5). New
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McCabe, Janet, and Kim Akass. “What Has HBO Ever Done for Women?” In The
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