FASES DE ESTUDIO

masculinity in particular. While many scholars and media commentators have decried the series’ depictions of violence, my focus on intersections of fantasy genre conventions and representations of violence and male embodiment indicate a more complex negotiation of normative masculinity than has been acknowledged in existing scholarship. Throughout the thesis, I argue that patriarchal violence is presented as monstrous and as part of a destructive cycle, whereas forms of violence that make the world a more liveable place allow characters to share their ideas and practices through a system of queer kinship. This chapter contributes to my discussion of monstrosity and cyclical patterns of destructive violence through a psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer reading of Martinverse constructions of monstrous masculine violence as it is perpetrated by some of the series’ most abhorrent characters: Joffrey Baratheon, Gregor Clegane, and Ramsay Bolton. The representation of these characters indicates how patriarchal violence is critiqued by association with the monstrous feminine, imagery that actively prevents men from reproducing the symbolic law and patriarchal family. This critique involves a circularity of horror wherein these monstrous men both enact abjection and are subjected to it, a process that reveals the inability of heteropatriarchal violence to produce anything but destruction.

To elucidate the mechanisms of this critique within the Martinverse I draw on Barbara Creed’s theory of the monstrous feminine, but argue—following Dallas Baker (2010)—that the monstrous feminine is better considered as part of the monstrous queer when enacted on male bodies. To say that becoming queerfunctions as a means of critique is not to suggest that queerness itself is monstrous. Just as Creed (1993, 7) argues that the “presence of the monstrous-feminine in the popular horror film speaks to us more about male fears than about female desire or subjectivity,” the queer monstrous feminine is evoked in the Martinverse in response to horrifying depictions of heteronormative masculinity because the feminine and the queer are that which the characters seek to banish with their aggression. As a result, the queer monstrous feminine ruptures the idea that patriarchal violence can be used to seamlessly gain power over feminine subjects. In a similar way to Judith Butler’s argument that drag is a confrontation with the citational and performative basis of what we take to be natural, attempts in the Martinverse to banish the Other expose the

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characters. Accordingly, when symbols of monstrous femininity such as the vagina dentata and the archaic mother (or prostheses that signify them) are projected onto male bodies in the Martinverse, patriarchal violence—not the feminine or the queer—is presented as monstrous and as part of a destructive cycle through the repetitive structures within the text.

Monstrous Feminine as Queer

Creed’s description of the forms of the monstrous are useful for illuminating the imagery that surrounds patriarchal violence throughout A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones: the unstable reproductive body, the archaic mother, the vagina dentata, the bloody mouth, and birth, all of which are coded as disgusting and terrifying. Certain characters use patriarchal violence to dominate the feminine, but they end up being linked with, and then consumed by it. Joffrey’s female victims regularly have blood on their mouths and he dies choking on red wine and vomiting blood. Gregor is continually splattered in gore that links him to the natural world and birth, and he is reborn as a Frankensteinesque monster, enslaved to Cersei Lannister in a bastardised form of queer kinship. Ramsay uses dogs as prosthetic toothed vaginas, and is eaten by them in turn. The narrative circularity asserts the horrific consequences of characters using patriarchal violence to bolster their own masculinity and reinforce existing power structures. In the Martinverse, patriarchal violence never takes place without taking a pound of flesh.

The prosthesis—in the form of prosthetic phalluses and prosthetic vagina dentata—adds to the queerness of the monstrous feminine when it is projected onto male bodies and illuminates the horrifying implications of patriarchal violence in the Martinverse. I understand prostheses to be objects, characters, or animals who allow a character to perform acts that they would not otherwise be able to achieve. Charul Patel (2014, 238) argues that Cersei uses men as prostheses that allow her to access a knightly body: “her lovers become a political prosthesis, a prosthetic phallus: the

armouring of her ‘vagina dentata’ or ‘purse’, a literal weapon through which she can control them and rule the throne.” Prostheses allow characters in the Martinverse to perform both masculinity and femininity simultaneously, and in this chapter I argue that monstrous masculine characters use or become prostheses in ways that initially allow them to banish the feminine and the queer through violence, but ultimately have the queer monstrous feminine projected onto their bodies and later are destroyed by it.

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Baker’s (2010) argument that when male bodies become monstrous, they become queer, offers a way of conceptualising monstrosity and maleness that can include femininity and

masculinity concurrently. For Baker, “it is the effeminate male that is chosen as the template for the monster […] because he refuses traditional masculinity; because he is somehow not a man at all […] he signifies an abject (queer) desire; he transgresses the border between normal and abnormal genders and sexualities” (2010, 5-6). Baker uses Kristevian abjection to bridge the gap between the monstrous feminine and the queer monster: “queer and gender ambiguous individuals resemble – in that they share certain aberrant characteristics – the abject figures of discourse that much of

Kristeva’s work attempts to define” (Baker 2010, 7). In other words, the queer is a monstrous mode because it disrupts the binaries that inform gender and sexuality. Baker focuses on the latter, which allows him to demonstrate how antagonists in fairy tales are often informed by stereotypes about lesbian, gay, and bisexual subjects, but prevents him from considering how gender ties into

monstrous queerness. For this reason his theoretical framework does not account for the ways that the symbols of monstrous femininity that Creed describes (and that are highly useful for analysing the images in the Martinverse) remain relevant and maintain their intelligibility as feminine even as they are transposed onto male bodies. I expand Baker’s and Creed’s work by theorising a mode of monstrosity that emphasises queer enactments of gender, which will help to illuminate the feminine imagery that is projected onto male bodied and masculine characters as a subversive reversal of their heteropatriarchal violence.

Depictions of masculine monstrosity in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones are intimately bound with images that signal the monstrous feminine, such as the various bloody mouths and births with which patriarchal violence is aligned. For this reason I build on Baker’s insight that feminine monstrosity does not necessarily make male or masculine monsters feminine. I argue that it can produce a queer monstrous feminine in which the forms of feminine monstrosity that Creed outlines can be projected onto masculine and/or male characters who retain their male body/masculinity but also become temporarily or partially feminine. In the same way that Butler (1993, 95) describes the structures of gender subversion, the queer monstrous feminine resignifies “the very terms which effect our exclusion and abjection” and becomes “an appropriation of the terms of domination that turns them toward a more enabling future.” In the Martinverse, the queer is presented as a solution to heterosexual and patriarchal violence: both as terrifying because of the imagery with which it is associated, and as a satisfying punishment for these evil characters, an

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instance of subversion coming from within the terms of the law. The dynamic is key to disrupting the simple and problematic equation of queerness with monstrosity. I will further pursue the “enabling future” of queerness in my analysis of female masculinities (chapter four), disability (chapter five), and gender fluidity (conclusion), where it is presented as positive or ambivalent.

Monstrous Interpellations

As explored in the previous chapter, the key to opening up space for a critique of heteropatriarchal masculinity in the Martinverse is a process of citational tension wherein the enactment of classical fantasy conventions in a postmodern narrative creates a structure for the critique. All of the characters discussed in this chapter are explicitly referred to as “evil,” casting their gendered and sexualised violence in terms of moral binaries that derive from classical fantasy. However, because these conventions are evoked in a postmodern narrative they disrupt the supposed naturalness of these violent acts, the male characters’ masculine performances, and the fantasy conventions through which all three are articulated.

Joffrey Baratheon, the sadistic boy-king of Westeros, is referred to as a monster but this characterisation is presented in such a way as to evoke classical fantasy genre conventions and thereby overburden the scene. In A Game of Thrones/season one Joffrey is betrothed to Sansa Stark, a naïve and idealistic young woman who enjoys “needlework, romantic poems, songs of chivalry and heroic deeds, and pretty things” (Larsson 2016, 31). Sansa’s character can be seen as a meta-textual reference to femininity in classical fantasy, especially when compared with her little sister, the tomboy Arya. Unlike her sister, Sansa is incredibly naïve: she betrays her father’s plans to escape the Queen’s clutches, and believes that Joffrey is her true love and gallant prince right up until he executes her father. She claims that, “in the songs, the knights never killed magical beasts, they just went up to them and touched them and did them no harm, but she knew Joffrey liked hunting, especially the killing part” (GOT 457). Later Sansa says that Joffrey is a “cruel king who had been her gallant prince a thousand years ago” (SoS2 260). Sansa touches upon the major problem with Joffrey’s violence—he uses it to satisfy his own personal desire for carnage—but she fails to reconcile this attitude with his good looks and royal blood because she is characterised as expecting his handsome exterior to be an expression of a moral heart. Sansa’s characterisation as slowly

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means that when she does position Joffrey as “a monster” (SoS1 87; S3E2) who is “evil and cruel”8

(SoS1 87), the interpellation exposes the unnaturalness of the citational acts that tie masculinity to particular genre conventions.

Ramsay Bolton is also interpolated into monstrosity through classical fantasy conventions, specifically through the princess in a tower figure, which strains the narrative.9 _{In A Dance with}

Dragons two Northern men, Robett Glover and Wyman Manderly, explain Ramsay’s misdeeds to Stannis Baratheon’s representative. Glover claims that “the evil is in his blood” and Wyman, gesturing toward Ramsay’s status as a bastard,10 _{says, “Was snow ever so black? […] Ramsay took}

Lord Hornwood’s lands by forcibly wedding his widow, then locked her in a tower and forgot her. It is said she ate her own fingers in her extremity. . . ” (DwD 456). The words “evil” and “black” signal the moral absolutism of classical fantasy, which is further foregrounded through the image of the woman “locked […] in a tower,” an act usually performed by a villain. However, the fact that the damsel in distress “ate her own fingers” reflects the graphic violence and gritty realism of

postmodern fantasy, a jarring textual pivot that foregrounds the monstrousinterpellations, the damsel, and the auto-cannibalism. The classical fantasy concept of the damsel in distress is woefully out of place—outmoded and naive, like Sansa and her stories—and their incongruity exposes their unnaturalness, which extends to Ramsay’s violence.

Gregor “the Mountain” Clegane’s interpellation into monstrosity—“the real monster in House Clegane” (FFC 511)—explicitly creates a conflict between classical and postmodern fantasy promises when the characters who discuss him are revealed to be out of (generic) place. In A Feast for Crows four characters comment on Gregor’s11 _{violence. Three of them represent the promises of}

classical fantasy, Ser Lyle “Strongboar” Crakehall and two noble women, Lady Amerei and Lady

8 _{For other examples of characters calling Ramsay a monster, see CoK 824 and SoS2 144.}

9_{Ramsay is also described as “mad and cruel, a monster” (DwD 291; also see “Book of the Stranger” [S6E4] and “The}

Door” [S6E5]).

10_{In Westeros bastards are given a generic last name based on where they were born. “Snow” is the last name associated} with bastards in the North.

11_{Strongboar, Lady Amerei, and Lady Mariya believe that is was Gregor’s brother Sandor who perpetrated the violence} because the perpetrator was sighted wearing a Sandor’s trademark snarling dog helm, but before the interpellation is made Jaime explicitly states that “what theywere describing sounded more like Gregor’s work than Sandor’s” (FfC 511). Since the chapter is narrated from Jaime’s perspective and he knows Gregor and Sandor better than the other characters,

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Mariya, where the fourth, the knight and the Queen’s twin brother Jaime Lannister, creates tension by reflecting a sceptical and pessimistic attitude characteristic of postmodern fantasy. Lady Mariya comments that Gregor’s violence “was the work of some fell beast in human skin,”12 _{to which}

Strongboar claims that it was “evil work” and vows to “return to hunt down [Gregor] and kill him for you. Dogs do not frighten me” (FfC 512). Strongboar’s casual vow to “kill him for you” and the word “evil” suggest a simple expectation that as a “good” character, Strongboar will easily defeat Gregor, as would be the case in classical fantasy. This genre structure’s logic is further emphasised when Lady Amerei names Strongboar “a true knight […] to help a lady in distress” (FfC 512). Jaime highlights the fact that his companions’ beliefs and values are misaligned with the narrative world, thinking: “at least she did not call herself ‘a maiden’” (FfC 512). By emphasising the roles they have assigned themselves, namely damsel in distress and knight in white, shining armour, Jaime’s interior monologue makes the characters’ naiveté and generic incongruence visible. The meta-textual commentary represents a dialogue between Martin’s postmodern fantasy and classical fantasy in which the moral absolutism of the latter is revealed as radically disconnected from both the novel’s and the reader’s world.

Performative constraint produces this overburdening of genre conventions, as it does gender performativity and abjection, as I have noted in chapter one. Joffrey, Ramsay, and Gregor use heteropatriarchal violence as a part of their explicitly embodied masculine performativity. Yet, just as the abject body haunts the intelligible one, their violence is turned on them when it is aligned with iconography that signals the queer monstrous feminine. This reversal is critical because it represents subversion coming from within the terms of the law, which for Butler is the only way in which dominant discourses can be contested. While the characters temporarily bolster their own masculinity by trying to forcefully banish the feminine, the violence is made horrifying through bloody mouths, images of birth, womb-like spaces, and snarling dogs, which evoke the horror of the female reproductive body, the vagina dentata, and theabject.

12 _{The same phrase is also used to describe the character Rorge, one of Ser Gregor’s men, in the same novel (FfC 722),} and with similar effects.

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The Bloody Mouth

Joffrey’s patriarchal violence is often critiqued through its association with bloody mouths, which recall both the abject and the vagina dentata. Creed (1993) contends that “fear of the castrating female genitals” (105) is part of the “iconography of the horror film, which abounds with images that play on the fear of castration and dismemberment” (107). She identifies “menacing, toothed mouths,” “the barred and dangerous entrance,” and the “animal companion with open jaws and snapping teeth” as hallmarks of the toothed vagina (1993, 107-108). Spaces, places, or animals that could be considered vaginal or womb-like in their form or function become vagina dentata when they are linked with violence, such as the bloody mouths that Joffrey’s patriarchal violence causes. According to Creed (1993, 107), “a trace of blood” on the lips connotes the toothed vagina but it also carries the added weight of abjection because the mouth represents one of the body’s most mutable openings (Conrich and Sedgwick 2017, 103).

The bleeding mouth is thus doubly abject, creating intense horror as it enters the narrative when Joffrey uses patriarchal violence against female characters. Joffrey uses prostheses, namely his Kingsguard (highly skilled knights who act as his personal bodyguards), to access violence in public because his youth13 _{and lack of military training, which would feminise him if not for his sovereign}

status. When he orders his Kingsguard to beat Sansa, “her lip split and blood ran down her chin, to mingle with the salt of her tears” (GoT 724-725; S1E10 “Fire and Blood”). Joffrey’s violence is narrated in ways that position it as disgusting and unsettling, in part because of the mixture of abject liquids and in part because of the jarring image of the innocent Sansa being beaten. The violence is coded as a hyperbolic act of domination because of Joffrey’s comments: he claims that “women are all weak” and in response to a snide remark from Sansa, he says that “a true wife does not mock her lord” (GoT 724). Joffrey’s patriarchal attitudes are highlighted, and the violence is coded as

(hetero)sexual: Tyrion comments that Joffrey’s violence against Sansa is often objectifying, “a matter

of some pretty teats” (CoK 480). Given Joffrey’s status as king and his betrothal to Sansa, his sexualisation of her body through violence takes on deeper significance: once they marry, he will reproduce the symbolic law and the law of the land through their children. These statements reveal Joffrey’s violence to be informed by sexism and heterosexuality, and indeed his insecurity,

themselves a part of his normative masculinity.

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Joffrey’s sexism reveals that his violence is an attempt to reinforce his familial class power, where that power is specifically patriarchal, heterosexual, and masculine. His patriarchal violence is also critiqued through the bloody mouth when he murders the prostitute Ros in “The Climb” (S3E6). The scene begins with a long shot of Joffrey lounging on a chair with his legs open, crossbow jutting between his thighs as a demonstration of his phallic power (fig. 1). The camera follows Joffrey as he walks from the room and past Ros’s corpse, which has been strung to a