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Some Knights are Dark and Full of Terror: The Queer Monstrous Feminine, Masculinity, and Violence in the Martinverse

2019; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/20512856.2019.1679446

2051-2864

Tania Evans,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Violence is intimately connected with the body, and in particular with male embodied masculinity, in George R. R. Martin’s fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire (1996-forthcoming) and its television adaptation Game of Thrones (2011–2019). While many scholars and media commentators have decried the series’ depictions of aggression, in this essay I focus on intersections of violence and male embodiment to reveal a more complex negotiation of normative masculinity than has been acknowledged in existing scholarship. A psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer reading of Martinverse constructions of monstrous masculine violence – by some of the series most abhorrent characters – Joffrey Baratheon, Gregor Clegane, and Ramsay Bolton – indicate how it is critiqued by association with the monstrous feminine. 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. Specifically, I argue that the normative male body and phallic masculinity are foregrounded alongside the symbols of the monstrous feminine. These instances rupture the illusion that a stable and coherent masculine subjectivity can materialise through horrifying depictions of heteronormative masculinity.