MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

In fiction of all kinds, the relationship between women and agency has been long analyzed and evaluated in academia. This paper specifically examines the dynamic of gender, power, and performance in the popular contemporary fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire - in particular, the three characters of Daenerys Targaryen, Sansa Stark, and Cersei Lannister. Further, this analysis of gender dynamics explores femininity as a source of agency and access to power, as opposed to the abandonment of the feminine as empowerment. Often in genre fiction, characters and plot lines tend toward familiar narrative archetypes. While Martin's fantasy series certainly adheres to these tropes in a multitude of ways, the aforementioned characters all enter the story typecast in some stereotype, but over time grow and develop to subvert, transform, or otherwise complicate those narratives. They each gain agency and subsequently employ power in ways contradictory to the common strategy of abandoning or discrediting the feminine to gain access to masculinity (and thus power), instead maintaining and even strengthening their ties to the feminine to do so. Using the characterization and story arcs of Daenerys, Sansa, and Cersei, I aim to look at how symbols and performances associated with the feminine, which are often thought of as weak or lesser, grant these female characters agency: aspects such as sympathy, emotionality, motherhood, and so on. In examining Martin's subversions of the recurring archetypes present in much of contemporary genre fiction, this paper showcases his interesting use of the feminine as access to power.