#gender in asoiaf
The woman bared the queen’s head first. Cersei sat as still as a stone statue as the shears clicked. Drifts of golden hair fell to the floor. She had not been allowed to tend it properly penned up in this cell, but even unwashed and tangled it shone where the sun touched it. My crown, the queen thought. They took the other crown away from me, and now they are stealing this one as well.
Cersei and Daenerys are two queens who have their “crowns” exposed, establishing a pattern between bare heads and queenship. In addition to her numerous queen foreshadowing throughout in the series, Arya is the third female POV character who has her crown exposed, hinting at an impending queenship following George Martin’s rule of threes.
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There is a peculiar mode of analysis in the ASOIAF fandom whereby we apply modern standards, both ideological and moral, to the concrete material actions of the characters who are textually addressed as progressive for their time. In the sense that if I praise a character for doing something that goes against the feudalist-patriarchal grain, the response will be “oh just having [x identity] person on the council or being [x identity] isn’t revolutionary”. Which is certainly true, and of course as a Marxist we need to criticize identity politics as it has infiltrated the left and normalized the logics of neoliberalism.
Having said that, though, what we consider “normal”, or indeed even banal and pedestrian at this point, was not considered “normal” in the time that GRRM is writing about. All critiques of GRRM portraying a hyper-violent, hyper-patriarchal, incredibly white feudalistic world aside, feudalism was still a violent institution and deeply patriarchal, and splitting hairs over to which degree of violence it was does not serve. Feudalism was deeply hierarchical and rigid and the most hellish for serfs and women in particular.
When we’re looking at the material or concrete actions of a given ASOIAF character, then, it doesn’t serve to just write them off as “well this is normal, anyone can do it” or “wow should so and so get a cookie for it?” or “so and so isn’t anti-classist just because they’re friends with xyz”. This kind of routine buzzword-fed dogmatism ignores the nature of feudalism and how it structured feudal society.
Feudalism is so regimented that the classes cannot intermingle outside of the strictly assigned roles: a servant cannot be friends with a noble lady, that’s preposterous! A butcher cannot share food from the same pot as a highborn knight. Why would a queen share her bed with her lowborn handmaids? Think about any depiction of feudalism or any analysis of feudal society: do the lowborn sleep in the same beds, or even in the same rooms, as the highborn? Are their homes and living quarters the same? Do they eat the same quality and quantity of food, and share food from the same plate? Are lowborn and highborn people typically good, close, intimate friends, to the point that lowborn people can feel safe and free to share their opinions and even push back against or criticize their liege lords and ladies? Do kings and queens have former slaves, freedmen, and servants on their councils or serving them as political advisors? Do women typically fight alongside men in armies? Do women become Knights? Are women allowed to be openly sexually free and liberal, wear whatever clothing they want, take as many partners they want? Can women be openly politically ambitious and prioritize their political independence? Are bastards typically allowed to have leadership positions, even prioritized above natural-born heirs? Do people of different ethnic groups, classes, nationalities, religions, and cultures intermingle easily, especially if they’re of different birth statuses?
As Khaleesi, Daenerys is progressive for being a Queen Consort who stops rape and pillaging and deliberately interferes with the patriarchal leadership and prevents them from engaging in patriarchal tradition that maintains their class power over women (taking women as sex slaves, spoils of war, reinforces the brutality of patriarchy). Queen Consorts derive their power from their husbands. By commanding her husband’s men and “taking” their “spoils” from them, and then cajoling her husband to make him agree, she steps out of her assigned feudal role, knowing she’ll face backlash, to protect women. In a modern era, this won’t be seen as impressive because we have a better understanding of rape and women’s rights; however, that understanding simply did not exist in ASOIAF. It is the same reason why Alysanne was progressive for abolishing the lord’s right of first night in the North. This is why Dany faces so much backlash and punishment later on – she defied patriarchal tradition by denying her assigned role, destroying its boundaries, and going against the grain to protect women. How many instances are there in history of a Queen Consort doing such a thing? Not many.
I need not go into detail about how progressive Daenerys is for abolishing slavery. Even if it’s a hotly debated topic in the fandom, a Queen Regnant, a conqueror as it were, deliberately conquering for the sake of abolishing slavery and ruling to stabilize a society post-abolition, making enemies out of the nobility rather than allying with them, and destroying the sea of the slave trade rather than profiting from it, is highly irregular. The typical action of a conqueror would have been to join the imperialist-slaver nexus and expand an empire thusly. She doesn’t do that. Not to mention that Daenerys derives this consciousness in large part from her own experiences as a bridal slave.
Speaking of Daenerys being a bridal slave, the fact that she is able to recognize that what happened to her is slavery, that she was sold, despite the fact that even she thinks women are supposed to be good wives to their husbands, and despite the fact that the society she grew up in taught her that diktat, is also important. This belies a proto-feminist recognition of the patriarchal nature of marriage itself, and how marriage underlies the class component of patriarchy. I do not expect Daenerys to be completely enlightened or progressive about the nature of marriage, but the fact that she’s able to articulate what happened to her and explicitly admit that it was a condition of bridal slavery is immensely important.
Daenerys is progressive for being a She-King and Khal. Again, by directly challenging the assigned feudal role to her, she normalizes the reality that women can be and can do more than just bear children, marry husbands, and die after “serving their purpose”. She’s progressive for having her own lover and being enthusiastically sexually active rather than restricting herself, in a time when women’s bodies are so policed and brutalized and used as property for men’s political games.
Daenerys is progressive for mourning the smallfolk and freedmen and lowborn people who die, the ones that she is accountable to. How many characters in ASOIAF base their feelings of love, vengeance, and passion on the lowborn people who died under their care? How many ASOIAF characters go through the series with that remembrance, with those names on their lips and in their hearts, with those names as their guiding light? How many Kings and Queens in real life history do you think did so? How many ASOIAF characters and in real life divert their political goals or put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of a lowborn girl like Eroeh, a slave like Doreah, etc?
Daenerys is progressive for sharing food and space and sleeping in the same beds and quarters as her handmaids. How many characters in ASOIAF share food with their servants? How many sleep in the same beds as their servants, give their servants gifts, stay in the same quarters as their servants? How many starve and suffer alongside them instead of making them cater to their needs, as Dany suffered alongside her people in The Red Waste and said she needed to be their strength, rather than her relying on them? She shares her bed with Irri, Jhiqui, and Missandei at alternative turns and shares quarters with them too, rather than relegating them to the corner of the room or “servant’s rooms” that are ten times tinier than a queen’s room. She does not feel revolted at sharing food or eating the same food as them. If your response to this is “there is nothing radical or revolutionary about having a friend with x identity”, take a look at ASOIAF and tell me how many of the other highborn characters share these qualities and then come back to me.
Daenerys is progressive for having freedmen, former slaves, women, and people of different ethnic groups on both her military council and political Court. She is progressive for listening to and heeding the advice of lowborn and formerly enslaved people and using their voices to inform her own policies and statecraft. Again, if your response to this is “well it’s easy to do this, it’s nothing special”, tell me how many leaders in ASOIAF, or feudal kings/queens/lords in history, had literal former slaves on their council and servants (scribes/heralds/handmaids) giving political advice and opinions and then lords/kings/queens taking said advice into account.
These things are radical for Dany’s time because they destroy and subvert the highly and elaborately structured roles given to classes of people under feudalism. If this was so easy for anyone in ASOIAF to do, then all the characters would do things like this, but they don’t, and that is why Dany stands out. And I’m not saying it’s just Dany––Arya is progressive for befriending anyone regardless of birth status and for becoming close to low-born smallfolk, Jon is progressive for having women fight as part of his command and re-integrating the Wildlings into Westeros, Brienne is progressive for being a true female Knight and bodily protecting smallfolk, Tyrion is progressive for trying to fight against the corrupt elite and deliberately undermining or undoing their plans as the acting Hand to the King. Overall, though, these are patterns that speak to subversive behavior and revolutionary behavior. If it was so easy for women to be part of a fighting military force or to become knights, if it was so easy for anyone to become truly good friends regardless of class status, if it was so easy for people of all ethnicities and occupations to have political roles, then the societies depicted in ASOIAF would look quite different.
I started this post over two months ago with the hope that it would help me work through my iffy feelings on Fire and Blood, namely how much I dislike the way many of the female characters are written in this book and how it repeats and expands on some unsavory elements of GRRM’s narrative that have been broadly noted in fandom across multiple books. But a closer look only increased my frustration with this book for how it underlined several of Martin’s problematic patterns when it comes to writing women but in a more condensed form this time, perhaps due to the nature of the medium. The history book form of F&B focuses these recurring problems and offers little to offset or challenge them that the authorial issue of casual and uncritical misogynistic writing feels more pervasive. It may be that Martin tried to address at least one aspect that’s been criticized before, but I remain disquieted with how he largely traded one issue for another.
Whatever the case, I think that a writer of Martin’s caliber and with his affinity for interrogating and examining traditional genre tropes can and should do better than this uncritical use of misogynistic writing that he not only leaves to stand unchallenged, but actively leans into. In this depressingly long post, I’ll address some of the problems that jumped out at me while reading. Feel free to add any I may have overlooked.
