You Win or You Die: Performances of Gender, Death, and Power in Game of Thrones
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/08/03/you-win-or-you-die-performances-of-gender-death-and-power-in-game-of-thrones
deadline for submissions: October 1, 2017
full name / name of organization: Lindsey Mantoan, Linfield College
contact email:
lmantoan@linfield.edu CALL FOR PROPOSALS
for a new anthology
You Win or You Die: Performances of Gender, Death, and Power in Game of Thrones
Called “the world’s most popular show” by TIME magazine, Game of Thrones has changed the landscape of serial narrative during an era hailed as the New Golden Age of TV. While an adaptation of George R. R. Martin’s epic fantasy A Song of Fire and Ice, the television show has taken on a life of its own, including creating original plotlines when the story advanced past the books that Martin has published.
With the death of protagonist Ned Stark at the end of Season One, Game of Thrones launched a killing spree in television: major characters die on popular shows every week now (for an excellent analysis of this trend and a demographic breakdown of who’s getting killed off, see
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/1/11669730/tv-deaths-character-best). While many shows kill off major characters for pure shock value, death on Game of Thrones produces seismic shifts in power dynamics and resurrected bodies that continue to fight on in war.
War in early seasons is solidly the purview of men, but by Season Six, women are literally and figuratively changing the battlefield, overthrowing the men who have dominated and controlled them, and vying for thrones. For a show that’s been accused of mishandling rape, using it for titillation and voyeurism rather than condemning it, the writers seem to be playing a different game with female characters as the narrative rushes toward its conclusion.
The complex dynamics of how gender, death, and power are performed in Game of Thrones warrants rigorous analysis by scholars in performance and media studies and beyond. Our proposed anthology will be divided into overlapping sections on gender, death, power, and performance.
Possible topics include:
GENDER - What kinds of performances of masculinity and femininity do we see in this show?
- Women as nurturers, women as vengeful assassins, women as queens
- Dany’s retinue includes two eunuchs and a dwarf, and by the time she arrives in Westeros, none of her closest advisors are alpha males. What does this say about gender and power?
- How does the show handle hypermasculinity?
- Jon Snow’s hair
- Sansa’s fantasies of marrying a prince, and her harsh realities
- The men who manipulate Cersei, and the way she takes her revenge
- The Sand Snakes and the trope of desert people being hypersexualized and violent
- Yara, Brienne, The Waif, and female masculinity
- Arya, marrying a nobleman, and “that’s not you”
- Gender, politics, and regionalism: how do politics and gender intersect differently north of the wall, in Dorne, in the rest of Westeros, and across the sea?
- What’s the significance of the men of the Night’s Watch swearing a vow of chastity, and why does Jon Snow get away with breaking it so easily? Why does Sam?
- Does the narrative critique the characters’ misogyny enough, or reify it?
- Motherhood (Cersei’s incestual children are all dead, Dany’s children are dragons)
- Sam’s gentle demeanor and academic nature
DEATH - What does the show seem to say about death, given that for so many characters, death is not the end?
- What is the distinction between alive and not?
- What do the narrative’s rituals related to death say about its values?
- Wights as zombies
- The distinction between White Walkers and their army of wights
- The relation between those resurrected by Red Priests/Priestesses and those resurrected by ice
- How does death often lead to new life or new dynamics of power (dragons, killer zombies, a king)
- “In the light of the seven,” “the night is dark and full of terrors,” “what is dead may never die,” and religion’s disposition toward death and resurrection
- Religion used to fight zombies and create them
- Arya’s list
- Supernatural and Faceless men, Three-Eyed Raven
POWER - What’s the show’s attitude toward war and violence?
- How does the show represent war?
- How does the show braid together issues of gender, violence, power, and war?
- Endless war
- Religion used as a weapon, a justification for violence, a political tool
- White trash (Freys, Greyjoys) and inbreeding
- The dynamics of color; ethnicity and race; rehearsal of Western hegemony under a slightly different name
- How does the show use accents to imply power and authority
- New languages--who speaks which language(s) and how does language interact with power?
- Low / no-tech world, pre-industrial society--does that give the show a pass on contemporary values?
- The above ideas relate to power within the narrative, but what about the power of this TV show? HBO’s budgets are some of the highest per episode of any television show in history, and GoT has influenced not only serial television but also films and novels. What kind of cultural and industry power does the show wield?
PERFORMANCE and REPRESENTATION - Performances of gender, sexuality, and power
- What gets performed around the show—fandom, social media, criticism, ComiCon, cosplay, watching parties
- The performance of the actors
- How do characters perform nobility, authority, power, family?
- Theater has a powerful impact on Arya Stark--how and why?
- The show has been criticized for the way it represents: sex, love, romance, same-sex intimacy, race, and violence. How are these criticisms apt? What do these criticisms miss?
- What stereotypes does the show trade in, especially in conflating region, geography, accent, class, and race?
Please submit 300-word abstracts to Lindsey Mantoan (
lmantoan@linfield.edu) and Sara Brady
(
Sara.Brady@bcc.cuny.edu) by Oct 1, 2017.
Last updated August 4, 2017
