Cripples and Bastards and Broken Things: Masculinity, Violence, and Abjection in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones

Abstract

Normative models of masculinity that are based upon violence, domination, and invulnerability are recognised by scholars as damaging for the individuals who enact them and for the societies in which they are enacted. In both the "real" world and the cultural texts that reflect and shape it, this narrow definition of masculinity is debated, reinforced, and/or critiqued. Challenges to normative masculinity are often identified in literary representations; but fantasy fiction seldom features in these analyses, despite the genre's ongoing engagement with masculine characters, themes, and images. The genre's long history of subversive content and ability to (re)imagine the world without the constraints of realism also suggest its capacity to expand conceptions of masculinity. Using a theoretical framework based primarily on Judith Butler's work on gender performativity and subversion, Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection, and Barbara Creed's notion of the monstrous feminine, I argue that, in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-) and its television adaptation Game of Thrones (2011-), when masculine characters use violence to gain power at others' expense, they are positioned as monstrous and are shown to be part of a destructive cycle, whereas when these characters use violence in ways that makes the world a more liveable place, they are able to maintain their constitutive borders and proliferate their ideas and practices through queer kinship. Illegal and excessive forms of violence used by normatively masculine characters, such as torture and rape, are critiqued through the same textual devices as legal and legitimate sovereign violence when they are individualistic and reproduce existing power structures. In contrast, female, disabled, and queer masculine characters make violence a visibly masculine act and use it in ways that are coded it as heroic or horrifying, depending on whether it empowers or disempowers others. The relationship between masculinity and violence is negotiated in the Martinverse in complex ways, and I demonstrate that the fantasy genre and its conventions have unique potential for presenting alternative masculine discourses and queer kinships that interrogate, refuse, or work the weaknesses in patriarchal logics of reproduction and repetition that maintain a lack of opportunity for certain subjects unable to access these privileged power dynamics.