Month: June 2019
Vile, Scheming, Evil Bitches? The Monstrous Feminine Meets Hegemonic Masculine Violence in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones
Aeternum: The Journal Of Contemporary Gothic Studies, 2018
Tania Evans
George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones have achieved immense popularity in the last decade and increasing attention within the academy. Several scholars have examined how women are constructed in the series, many of whom argue that audiences, meanings, and conventions have profound effects upon how readers…
Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies
Volume 5, Issue 1 © June 2018
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The Cersei of the
Game of Thrones
adaptation enacts masculinity with violence more than sexuality, and when she does so the evil queen and the
vagina dentata
operate in ways that repudiate this masculine practice. In
Game of Thrones
Cersei’s acts of sexual
coercion are written out, and the only sexual relationship that she has is with her twin
brother Jaime and her cousin Lancel. Even these are transformed to lessen Cersei’s
agency; there is a rape scene
added between Jaime and Cersei after Joffrey’s death (see
Ferreday 2015, 28-33), and Lancel is figured as a weak replacement for Jaime but not, as he is in the novels, also a man that Cersei is manipulating through sex. The same is true of violence in the first half of the series. In
Women in Game of Thrones,
Valerie
Estelle Frankel claims that “the books show [Cersei] indulging in dozens of murders, while in the show she’s shocked and helpless in the face of Joffrey’s brutality” (2014,
89). Frankel is corr
ect in her assessment that Cersei’s violence is transposed onto her
son, although her female masculinity is expressed in other ways. Clothing connotes
Cersei’s female masculinity to a greater extent in each new season of
Game of Thrones:
feminine clothing such as dresses receive embellishments
—
hard metals, armour-like cuts, and actual armour
—
that make her attire visible as masculine. Beginning with a
thin metal belt around her waist in season one, Cersei’s dresses increasingly
incorporate masculine armour, from a full breastplate at the end of season two to an armoured under bust corset in season three, and so on. The masculinity that the
costume evokes is compounded in seasons six and seven after Cersei’s long blonde
hair is cut off for her walk of penance at end of season five, and she chooses to maintain her short hair as Queen. In the most recent season at the time of writing, season seven, Cersei wears a black leather dress with silver and black brocade shoulder pads that resemble armour. Freed of the constraints of normative femininity because of her class and sovereign power, the Cersei in
Game of Thrones
publicly embraces her female masculinity through her choice of clothing. Cersei also performs female masculinity through violence, which is continually rejected through its alignment with the monstrous feminine and the evil queen. She
uses the monstrous Gregor ‘the Mountain’ Clegane, a physically gigantic man brought
back to life by a necromancer, as a body empty of life and so capable of becoming the
muscle behind her “evil intent” (Creed 1993, 108). The masculine violence that Cersei
orders Gregor to commit often occurs in dark, enclosed areas such as tunnels or
dungeons, and features “barred and dangerous entrances” (ibid, 107). In the season
five e
pisode “No One” (S5E8), the Faith Militant attempt to seize Cersei and she is told
that is she resists, they will use violence. The camera moves to a close-up shot of
Cersei, who says “I choose violence” (S5E8) right before Gregor rips one of the soldiers’
heads off with his bare hands. Cersei’s use of hegemonic violence to
demonstrate her masculinity and authority in this encounter is immediately problematised through the
vagina dentata.
As blood trails across the stone floor, the camera shows a high angle shot from the inside of one of the palace grates. The top
half of the frame shows the grate’s intricate pattern, which resembles rows and rows
of teeth with a small hole in the middle and the bottom half reveals blood dripping down the dark walls. The grate and its patterns evoke the
vagina dentata,
inviting
viewers to feel horrified at Cersei’s actions as evil queen, implied through her
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authority and the castle architecture. The monstrous feminine and the fantasy genre operate alongside one another to invite the viewer to experience feelings of horror in
response to Cersei’s masculine violence.
Multiple forms of the monstrous feminine, including the
vagina dentata,
the archaic mother, and the monstrous womb, are invoked simultaneously to create a sense of
discomfort surrounding Cersei’s violence in the season six finale, “The Winds of Winter,” when she murders the majority of Westerosi nobility in a magical
explosion at the sept where her trial is being held. When Cersei does not appear at the sept, her cousin Lancel, a member of the Faith Militant, is sent to find her. After seeing a boy run from the building, Lancel follows into a dark tunnel where he finds barrels
of magical ‘wildfire’ that are about to ignite. Over a full minute of combined screen
time is spent on Lancel running and then crawling through the tunnels in an attempt to reach the candles before they transform the magical green liquid into an inferno.
Lancel’s attempt to stop the massacre is intercut with shots of Cersei and her son in
their palace bedrooms and the sept where some of the other characters realise that
Cersei’s absence may be a sign of impending catastrophe. Gradually swelling music increases the scene’s suspense, but it is Lancel’s journey through the tunnel that
provides narra
tive momentum and aligns Cersei’s act of terrorism with the monstrous
feminine. The tunnel itself evokes the
vagina dentata
through its shape and the
explosives it harbours, like the “tunnels and caves” hiding “spiders, snakes or bats
which attack the unwa
ry” in horror films (Creed 1993, 108). This image of the
vagina dentata
works alongside the archaic mother, which is cited in the same way as the film
Alien
(1979), through “womb
-like imagery, [and] the long winding tunnels leading to
inner chambers” (Creed, 1993, 19). Even the barrels of wildfire can be read as “rows of hatching eggs,” embryos of destruction that Cersei has planted beneath the city
(ibid, 19). If the wildfire barrels are read as monstrous eggs, the explosion can be read as a monstrous birt
h. The city’s “surface is no longer closed, smooth and intact –
rather
the body looks as if it may tear apart, open out, reveal its innermost depths” (Creed 1993, 58). As green fire engulfs the city, King’s Landing is torn apart literally as its
infrastructure crumbles, and symbolically as the religious headquarters and the nobility are destroyed. Cersei watches the mayhem from a palace balcony with a glass of wine in hand and a small smile on her face. Even here, the violence in the vaginal tunnel is linked back to Cersei as she surveys the scene, an evil queen par excellence, with two pillars visible in the background of every frame like giant fallopian tubes. The
mise-en-scène
surrounding Cersei’s masculine violence evokes many facets of the
monstrous feminine, and because of the horror that these images inspire, the viewer is encouraged to elide hegemonic violence as an act through which masculinity is performed. Filmic devices such as
mise-en-scène
, dialogue, and setting are also mobilised to connote the evil queen and
vagina dentata
as a means of critiquing Cersei’s enjoyment of masculine violence when she tortures Septa Unella in “The Winds of Winter,” one
of the women who oversaw her imprisonment by the Faith Militant. Cersei accuses
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the woman of being a sadist and then reveals her own love of masculine violence. As
she walks around the Septa’s body testing the ropes that bind her, Cersei says:
I do things because they feel good. I drink because it feels good. I killed my husband because it felt good to be rid of him. I fuck my brother because it feels good to feel him inside me (S6E10).
Alcohol, violence, assertiveness, and sexuality are presented as the performative
practices through which Cersei’s female masculinity, and masculinities in the
Mart
inverse, materialise. The phrase “I fuck my brother” places Cersei in the active
(sexual) position and highlights the authority and power that underwrite her character in later seasons of the series as she is able to embrace her female masculinity as Queen
Regent. Masculine violence is by far the most critical stylised act for Cersei’s
gender performance, as she tells the Septa: I killed your high sparrow, and all his little sparrows, all his septons and all his septas, all his filthy soldiers, because it felt good to watch them burn. It felt good to imagine their shock and their pain. No thought has ever given me greater joy (S6E10). Cersei takes great pleasure in masculine violence, specifically domination and revenge. Yet her attitude is critiqued throughout the monologue and afterwards through imagery that evokes the
vagina dentata.
The room appears to glisten wetly as Cersei speaks because the lights in the background are out of focus, and her jewel incrusted shoulder pads twinkle because of the light from the torches, giving her regal costume a wet look. When Cersei finishes speaking, the camera moves to a long shot of the dungeon room, which resembles a cavernous womb (S6E10). Both the vaginal chamber and the glistening walls and costume evoke the toothed vagina
,
which Creed
links with “a darkened doorway” and “tunnels and caves” filled with dangerous animals that “attack the unwary” (1993, 108). In “The Winds of Winter” it is Cersei lurking “
in the darkness”
(Martin 2011e, 549), waiting to order her henchman, Gregor Clegane, to dismember Septa Unella. While it is Gregor who enacts the final act of violence in this scene, it is Cersei who controls and orchestrates it. Violence is the means by which she performs female masculinity, even as this act is made horrifying through the monstrous feminine and fantasy genre conventions, specifically the
vagina dentata
and the evil queen.
Concluding Remarks
By analysing Cersei Lannister’s enactment of female masculinity through Creed’s concept of the monstrous feminine and Butler’s work on gender performativity, this
article has shown that women in
A Song of Ice and Fire
reveal the masculinity in certain stylized acts
—
such as violence and domination
—
and invite audiences to engage with them from a new critical perspective. Female bodies do not make masculine performances problematic; rather, it is the violent practices that divide people,
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endanger society, and maintain a masculine hierarchy. It could be argued that the discomfort audiences are invited to experience arises because Cersei transgresses the boundaries of what women can say, rather than her violent acts. However, similar
threats of violence by Cersei’s son Joffrey and his father Robert in
A Game of Thrones
are likewise problematized (Martin [1996] 2011a, 342, 724), which suggests that it is
masculine violence that leads to monstrosity rather than Cersei’s female masculinity.
Cersei’s actions may be read as empowering or subversive because she
challenges patriarchal institutions such as the church, marriage, and the patriarchal feudal system. A woman ruler is significant within the fantasy genre, even if she
proves to be, as Margery Tyrell claims, “a vile, scheming, evil bitch” (Martin [2005]
2011e, 738). Almost all of
Cersei’s decisions are hastily made and poorly considered,
which may suggest to readers that female masculinities are poor imitations of male masculinities, or worse, that women should be excluded from power because they cannot rule effectively. However, it is masculine practices such as violence and domination
—
monstrous stylized acts
—
that make Cersei an evil queen.
Rather than contesting dominant and oppressive gender regimes, she retraces the steps of the patriarchy and achieves the same monstrous ends. This repetition is visible in her violence, as her female masculinity allows her to occupy the role of Kingslayer, a nickname attached to her twin brother Jaime after
he murdered Robert’s predecessor. Cersei makes herself a Kingslayer by imagining
herself as the regicidal boar while she has sex with Taena and by positioning her
consumption of Robert’s sperm as regicide. These repetitive echoes indicate that Cersei’s female masculinity is, as Butler argues:
a personal/cultural history of received meanings subject to a set of imitative practices which refer laterally to other imitations and which, jointly, construct the illusion of a primary and interior gendered self ([1990] 1999, 188).
Cersei’s female masculinity is informed by the “other imitations” of
masculinity that she has witnessed in the pseudo-medieval fantasy world. Violence and domination
are central in Cersei’s milieu, and as she repeats them she also ensures their continued
reproduction
—
particularly when she uses her newly announced pregnancy to justify
her violent crusade to ensure the Lannister legacy in the season seven finale, “The Dragon and the Wolf.” The masculine practices she draws upon and reproduces are
not simply reproductions of a male-bodied masculine original but part of a conste
llation of “repeated acts that seek to approximate the ideal of a substantial
ground of identity, but which, in their occasional
dis
continuity, reveal the temporal
and contingent groundlessness of this ‘ground’” (Butler [1990] 1999, 192, original
emphasis). As a character whose gender identity, identification, and presentation do not align with her sexed body in ways that are normatively enforced, Cersei is one
such example of ‘discontinuity’ that may be used to challenge claims that men are
naturally violent and dominant
–
both in fantasy fiction and the ‘real’ world.
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This article has sought to help begin and develop a conversation among popular culture scholars about masculinity in fantasy fiction, and as such there are many directions in which future research can be taken. It would be valuable to employ a reception analysis to determine how audiences are interpreting masculine women, particularly whether they link monstrosity to masculinity rather than simply to specific women. Moreover, it is worth asking whether there are masculine women in
Martin’s series who wield masculine traits more successfully than men, and if so, whether they illustrate a more inclusive direction from which ‘real’ men could learn.
What is clear from the above analysis is that by combining hegemonic masculine practices with fantasy conventions such as the evil queen,
A Song of Ice and Fire
and
Game of Thrones
consistently evoke the monstrous feminine. In so doing, they invite
audiences to question how they themselves “do” gender a
nd whether they are, consciously or unconsciously, retracing the bloody path to power advocated by hegemonic masculine discourses. Yet female masculinity, like popular fiction, is never ideologically resolved but serves numerous political projects.
Some masculine women in the fantasy genre, such as Cersei, reinforce patriarchal power, whereas others menace the entire gender order (Halberstam 1998, 9). If masculine women challenge the naturalised link between masculinity and the male body even when they repeat destructive acts such as violence, those who enact more productive performative styles require urgent critical attention, as they may offer a means of (re)conceptualising masculinity in healthier ways.
nd
About Author
Tania Evans is a researcher at the Australian National University and an associate lecturer in English and Media Studies at the University of New South Wales and an associate lecturer in Children’s Literature at the Australian Catholic University in … more ▾