Feminist Responses to ASoIaF

[owlmoose]

So I've been meaning to write my own big long post on this topic, but I'm holding off until I finish the first season of the HBO series (which, if my current schedule holds, should happen a week from today). Meanwhile, though, I've been busy mulling over Sady Doyle's recent takedown of the series in Tiger Beatdown. It's been frustrating to me, because I'm hard put to actually argue with much that she says there (except for some factual errors regarding who is claiming to be king of what), and yet the whole thing doesn't sit right with me, for reasons that I was unable to fully explain.

Fortunately, Alyssa Rosenberg of Think Progress does a really excellent job of explaining them for me. I don't agree totally with everything in the Think Progress critique, but there is a lot in here that helped me see why I found the Tiger Beatdown piece reductionist and disappointing. Definitely recommended.

As for my own thoughts... I'll come back with them next week. I hope.

Comments

[zen_monk]

Note: Have only superficial knowledge of A Song of Ice and Fire. Didn't read or watch the series, so I'll just about the both sides' arguments.

I've read both links, and both have reminded me very much on how pertinent both articles are in what I'm trying to do with my life. I'll try to the best of my ability what kind of argument I'm going to make of this, so bear with me.

I am very much convinced that Sady Doyle's argument is fallacious on many grounds. She misapplies the value and belief system of the book series to be analogous to Western modern-day value and belief systems, and she seems to conclude that the author puts in racism and sexism because he likes to put them in and because he is the author, his narrative voice must mean that he supports racist views and wants young girls sexualized at pubescence. By extension, she believes that fans of the series must therefore support these vicious values. It feels like she was reviewing a YA novel series rather than a mature body of work that is supposed to be appreciated by readers who have mature minds and have an established belief system. Rather than believing it to be a body of work that is developed within the confines of a specific genre, she claims it to be an "an airbrushed, dragon-infested Medieval Europe [that] strikes me as fundamentally conservative."

What is supposed to be a non-airbrushed Medieval/Dark Ages Europe? A place where everyone is literate and that there are universities whose student population is predominately women and has a thriving Asian community? That everyone is a basic understanding of other cultures' religions and belief system and are told to tolerate them? Also, for someone who is supposed to be morally outraged at the treatment of the female characters, she bashes them indiscriminately over their foibles and characterization. She neither supports the "Action Girls" because she saw them as unbelievable to the setting of the novels nor is she being understanding of the ones who aren't because they are conforming to violent, male-dominated society. She dislikes how homogenous the cultures are as well as being ethnocentric and therefore racist, but she cannot believe that a fictional Caucasian society would outlaw slavery and tack it on as whitewashing despite already proving that that society already sucks because they subjugate girls.

Also, what I believe is that the way she writes her argument, which is full of hyperboles and exaggerations, hides the fact that she doesn't think critically on her argument. If she wants to prove her claim that GRRM is a creep and that everyone else should believe that as well as thinking he's a closet pedophile, she should make a better case without having every other line proclaiming how racist this character is and how sexist and demeaning that one is. She neither focuses on the world to provide context on her reasoning and instead we are led to believe that this is a sordid world force-fed to us to believe that it's natural simply because it is based on our moral code.

Rosenberg's beautifully counters Doyle's argument in a well-crafted and logical article which, while specifically addressing the Doyle's claims and premises, is written to point out that Doyle's line of thinking is not unique only to her and that it can applicable to the broader subject what readers expect out of their genre fiction. Whether it is the notion that because it is fiction, the world can therefore be crafted to be more idealized and utopian, or the perception that the subject the author is writing about is therefore what the author supports because it's not like there's some modern-day moral guardian to protest the grisly realities of the SOIAF world.

And that's my rambling, hopefully coherent two cents of the day.