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aslant[n.b. spoilers in the links and in my entry, if that's not obvious!]
TL;DR: Rosenberg makes some good points, but ultimately I think her viewpoint boils down to Doyle is wrong because Martin was just writing nuance and reality which is problematic because it reinforces the sexism and racism embedded in Martin's work. Interrogate Your Privilege, yo. I need that on a shirt. IYP.
It's the ouroboros of critique!
Problems in Rosenberg's Critique of Doyle's Critique
I've had this bubbling around internally for a while now -- last week I finished the fifth and recent book, A Dance With Dragons -- but more generally I've had the whole Feminism and Misogyny in Fantasy topic on my mind ever since having this conversation with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mordicai about Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, and getting into the HBO series and subsequently reading through the books.
I was very interested to see Alyssa Rosenberg's critique linked by Mordicai -- Rosenberg's piece is a response to Sady Doyle's critique on Tiger Beatdown. (Go read Doyle's piece, because it is hilarious in addition to being an astute rundown of the rape, sexism and racism, etc.) In addition to her main points (the series is sexist and racist), Doyle does a really cool thing in her review, I thought, by calling out the fandom on the whole Why Don't You Like My Toys response thing. Having seen this in my own household (my husband LOVES these books and grew up with them, years before meeting me, his feminist wife who is usually throwing side-eye in the direction of a lot of his faves) as well as in trolled threads, I was glad to see her address this aspect of it -- it's hard to see something you love criticized -- but I wish she'd gone further into the critical reasons why we need to engage beyond the sandbox. But that part was largely lost, and Rosenberg took Doyle up on a number of points, disagreeing with Doyle's (purported) assertions:
1) That reading literature set in an actual historical period or a fictional one represents either an embrace of the values of that period or a nostalgia for them.
2) That it would be more productive to use fantasy to imagine a land where the threats to women that existed in a commensurate era were eliminated.
3) If you’re going to depict sexual or domestic violence, you need to justify that depiction according to a higher standard—but the criteria for doing that are totally unclear.
4) That to depict female incompetence is sexist.
Leaving aside the fact that I think Rosenberg has misinterpreted Doyle's piece in a few important ways, what troubles me most is that Rosenberg's points seem to boil down to a belief that there are no structural or cultural underpinnings to Martin's work as a white western male that may have contributed to the patterns of sexism and racism that run throughout the work. Is every sentence in the books a direct result of sexism and racism? No. Are there overarching patterns? Hell yes. To intimate otherwise is a failure to interrogate the kinds of racism and sexism that are endemic to fantasy (and other genres, and society as a whole).
My original rant on Mordicai's review went off on a bit of a tangent about violence, but my essential reaction at the time, which stands firm today with a little more perspective after reading the whole series, is as follows: George R.R. Martin has created an entirely misogynistic world in which there are few sympathetic or unraped female characters (Doyle sends this up hilariously/frighteningly with her recurring Who's Molesting Sansa Stark Today roundup), which in my view is largely a factor of his own built-in cultural and personal baggage of sexism and racism.
Rosenberg's review is very much an exercise in reinforcing the status quo: violence gets to stay in the book, pedophilia gets to stay in the book, rape gets to stay in the book, female characters repeatedly being shown as weak for having sex or an opinion gets to stay in the book, racism gets to stay in the book. I'm not arguing any of these can disappear completely from fiction (nor, would I argue, is Doyle arguing that point, contrary to Rosenberg's rather straw-man argument against that particular point): but I think there is are ways and ways to write about these things. Reading Rosenberg's piece, for me, was an exercise in rape culture/racism bingo. "It's realistic!" and "But I liked it" and "What about the violence against men?" and "pipe down or no one will listen to you," if it looks like entrenched privilege and it sounds like entrenched privilege...
Here are some of the particular arguments in Rosenberg's piece that stuck out to me:
"The reason that endemic sexual violence is a part of his world is because it’s part of Martin’s efforts to tell us that Westeros and Pentos are really terrible places to live in."
"But I’m troubled by the fact that Sady and a lot of other feminist critics don’t seem to have a good explanation or brightline for when a scene of sexual or domestic violence is acceptable in art—not that I would necessarily agree with where they drew the line—because without one, they’re in danger of setting a standard where no depiction of sexual assault is ever permissible."
"Because, let’s face it: movies and TV are full of tons of scenes of people getting murdered, maimed, and killed…and while it’s sometimes brutally realistic and painful to watch, more often its highly stylized, very pretty, and–dare I say it?–even sexy." (quote from Lux Alptraum)
"A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation."
"It strikes me as oddly myopic to read a novel where literally every character makes grave strategic miscalculations as arguing that women’s bad decisions are caused by their lady bits."
The overarching point is that we need rape and institutionalized pedophila in order to make it real and valid; and moreover that Martin's problematic female characters are complex rather than part of troubling larger patterns, both in his work, in the genre as a whole, and within the culture as a whole. What Rosenberg seems to have missed, most troubling to me, is the idea that any of Martin's choices as a writer could have possibly be driven by structural or personal racism or sexism, consciously or unconsciously. In this realm, any racism or sexism is only because the reader is too stupid to get that it's part of Martin's brilliance as opposed to the reader might be seeing structural issues that Martin was incapable of writing around
This is why I really appreciate Doyle's piece, even though I don't agree with every part of it. (Rosenberg fastens on the idea that not everyone who consumes historical fiction longs for that time to return, in her Mad Men example, which is true, but there is another level here: fiction that engages with systems of power rather than replicating them blindly) Doyle boils it down, the female characters have shitty ends, shitty beginnings, and the rare non-shitty storyline.
Daenerys is an example of a female who does mostly okay, despite being a 13 year old who has a lot of enthusiastic sex with a lot of grown ass men, but I'd like to point out that Daenerys is largely paralyzed, as a ruler, by Martin trying to delay (presumably?) her arrival at the (presumed?) final battle/war in Westeros for the Iron Throne for FIVE FUCKING BOOKS, in which she mainly falls in love with people, loses them, and dithers around dealing with slavery (white savior syndrome, yup). Aside from maintaining her position of power (owing to her ownership of three powerful dragons) she doesn't do much.
And at this point, the only unmolested girl child, Arya, has essentially ceded from theunion series in a storyline that, at the close of the fifth book, has absolutely zero connections to the main plot. Seriously, I think that Martin kind of got bored and wished he could write a novel just about Arya, so he forgot about bringing her plotline back into the main story.
I'm going off on a tangent here. My reactions to Martin's work is frequently complicated by the fact that he might be a competent writer, but he is not a great writer. He frequently squanders a good lede. I wish his editors had not been asleep at the wheel (or maybe they weren't, and this was as close to good as they could get) and had helped him with some of the laggy sections. Or how about his recurring problem of closing the book with a good, satisfying, cliffhanger-y bang, and then following it up with the most draggy, awful, pointless Epilogue you've ever read? So I frequently feel like I'm interpreting two levels of Martin: one is his mediocre talent as a writer, which is okay but not that great, and the other level is his entrenched sexism and racism, which he appears to have reined in a tiny bit in the intervening years (Book one was begun in 1991, published in 1996) but not by enough to make me believe he fundamentally believes in equality, by any stretch of the imagination.
Finally, Rosenberg's issue with Doyle's writing: "[Doyle]’s set up a paradigm where only her sense that the scenes of sexual assault in George R.R. Martin’s novels are inappropriately arousing counts. No one else’s experiences reading the books are valid" ...which I would argue is not explicitly a point of Doyle's piece at all. But! Actually! This reinforces some of the points that Rosenberg makes -- i.e. that where some people see only rape, others see "[Baratheon] reinforces his patheticness and gives some nuance to her subsequent sexual affairs"...and Rosenberg sees Doyle's piece as obviating all other critical and feminist (or non-feminist) responses to the piece, which is not not something I see explicitly or implicitly a part of Doyle's review. (So yes, now we have a feminist interpreting a feminist's reaction to another feminist, and here's where the snake swallows its tail and we can all affirm the importance of critical dialogues, yes? Okay.) The point is that Rosenberg sees Doyle's opinion as stepping on her (Rosenberg's) toes, which I feel is a lot to do with Rosenberg and not a whole lot to do with Doyle. So where do we take responsibility for the effect of our (angry, loud, feminist) words? And where do we stop to reevaluate the effect of our (privileged, entrenched, racist, sexist) words to find better ways to communicate?
As a feminist reader of fantasy (and other books, but wearing my fantasy consumer hat today) I have to say it is tremendously satisfying that there are two published viewpoints and a healthy debate going about this. As readers, we deserve more, and more frequent, and more nuanced discussions about these issues in books. But I am not happy to see Doyle's excellent (if cheeky) analysis trivialized or dismissed in ways that reinforce the author's race and gender privilege while refusing to interrogate the reader's privilege in interpreting same. Readers (and writers!) are capable and deserve better and more nuanced discussions on gender and race based privilege.
[Another time, I would love to talk about the other supposedly-feminist historical fantasy piece Rosenberg mentions, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, which I loved loved loved as a budding pagan hippie child of 14 but subsequently re-read and was pretty shocked to find it a problematic piece...you can affirm the mystic pagan goddess power all day long but when your main priestess lady has deep self-loathing when she has sex? Problematic! Lots of stuff like that, as I recall from rereading it two or three years ago. Has anyone else reread this as an adult and had similar thoughts?]
TL;DR: Rosenberg makes some good points, but ultimately I think her viewpoint boils down to Doyle is wrong because Martin was just writing nuance and reality which is problematic because it reinforces the sexism and racism embedded in Martin's work. Interrogate Your Privilege, yo. I need that on a shirt. IYP.
It's the ouroboros of critique!
Problems in Rosenberg's Critique of Doyle's Critique
I've had this bubbling around internally for a while now -- last week I finished the fifth and recent book, A Dance With Dragons -- but more generally I've had the whole Feminism and Misogyny in Fantasy topic on my mind ever since having this conversation with
mordicai about Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire, and getting into the HBO series and subsequently reading through the books.I was very interested to see Alyssa Rosenberg's critique linked by Mordicai -- Rosenberg's piece is a response to Sady Doyle's critique on Tiger Beatdown. (Go read Doyle's piece, because it is hilarious in addition to being an astute rundown of the rape, sexism and racism, etc.) In addition to her main points (the series is sexist and racist), Doyle does a really cool thing in her review, I thought, by calling out the fandom on the whole Why Don't You Like My Toys response thing. Having seen this in my own household (my husband LOVES these books and grew up with them, years before meeting me, his feminist wife who is usually throwing side-eye in the direction of a lot of his faves) as well as in trolled threads, I was glad to see her address this aspect of it -- it's hard to see something you love criticized -- but I wish she'd gone further into the critical reasons why we need to engage beyond the sandbox. But that part was largely lost, and Rosenberg took Doyle up on a number of points, disagreeing with Doyle's (purported) assertions:
1) That reading literature set in an actual historical period or a fictional one represents either an embrace of the values of that period or a nostalgia for them.
2) That it would be more productive to use fantasy to imagine a land where the threats to women that existed in a commensurate era were eliminated.
3) If you’re going to depict sexual or domestic violence, you need to justify that depiction according to a higher standard—but the criteria for doing that are totally unclear.
4) That to depict female incompetence is sexist.
Leaving aside the fact that I think Rosenberg has misinterpreted Doyle's piece in a few important ways, what troubles me most is that Rosenberg's points seem to boil down to a belief that there are no structural or cultural underpinnings to Martin's work as a white western male that may have contributed to the patterns of sexism and racism that run throughout the work. Is every sentence in the books a direct result of sexism and racism? No. Are there overarching patterns? Hell yes. To intimate otherwise is a failure to interrogate the kinds of racism and sexism that are endemic to fantasy (and other genres, and society as a whole).
My original rant on Mordicai's review went off on a bit of a tangent about violence, but my essential reaction at the time, which stands firm today with a little more perspective after reading the whole series, is as follows: George R.R. Martin has created an entirely misogynistic world in which there are few sympathetic or unraped female characters (Doyle sends this up hilariously/frighteningly with her recurring Who's Molesting Sansa Stark Today roundup), which in my view is largely a factor of his own built-in cultural and personal baggage of sexism and racism.
Rosenberg's review is very much an exercise in reinforcing the status quo: violence gets to stay in the book, pedophilia gets to stay in the book, rape gets to stay in the book, female characters repeatedly being shown as weak for having sex or an opinion gets to stay in the book, racism gets to stay in the book. I'm not arguing any of these can disappear completely from fiction (nor, would I argue, is Doyle arguing that point, contrary to Rosenberg's rather straw-man argument against that particular point): but I think there is are ways and ways to write about these things. Reading Rosenberg's piece, for me, was an exercise in rape culture/racism bingo. "It's realistic!" and "But I liked it" and "What about the violence against men?" and "pipe down or no one will listen to you," if it looks like entrenched privilege and it sounds like entrenched privilege...
Here are some of the particular arguments in Rosenberg's piece that stuck out to me:
"But I’m troubled by the fact that Sady and a lot of other feminist critics don’t seem to have a good explanation or brightline for when a scene of sexual or domestic violence is acceptable in art—not that I would necessarily agree with where they drew the line—because without one, they’re in danger of setting a standard where no depiction of sexual assault is ever permissible."
"Because, let’s face it: movies and TV are full of tons of scenes of people getting murdered, maimed, and killed…and while it’s sometimes brutally realistic and painful to watch, more often its highly stylized, very pretty, and–dare I say it?–even sexy." (quote from Lux Alptraum)
"A world where women are perfectly safe, perfectly competent, and society is perfectly engineered to produce those conditions strikes me as one where we can’t tell any very interesting stories about women’s struggles and women’s liberation."
"It strikes me as oddly myopic to read a novel where literally every character makes grave strategic miscalculations as arguing that women’s bad decisions are caused by their lady bits."
The overarching point is that we need rape and institutionalized pedophila in order to make it real and valid; and moreover that Martin's problematic female characters are complex rather than part of troubling larger patterns, both in his work, in the genre as a whole, and within the culture as a whole. What Rosenberg seems to have missed, most troubling to me, is the idea that any of Martin's choices as a writer could have possibly be driven by structural or personal racism or sexism, consciously or unconsciously. In this realm, any racism or sexism is only because the reader is too stupid to get that it's part of Martin's brilliance as opposed to the reader might be seeing structural issues that Martin was incapable of writing around
This is why I really appreciate Doyle's piece, even though I don't agree with every part of it. (Rosenberg fastens on the idea that not everyone who consumes historical fiction longs for that time to return, in her Mad Men example, which is true, but there is another level here: fiction that engages with systems of power rather than replicating them blindly) Doyle boils it down, the female characters have shitty ends, shitty beginnings, and the rare non-shitty storyline.
Daenerys is an example of a female who does mostly okay, despite being a 13 year old who has a lot of enthusiastic sex with a lot of grown ass men, but I'd like to point out that Daenerys is largely paralyzed, as a ruler, by Martin trying to delay (presumably?) her arrival at the (presumed?) final battle/war in Westeros for the Iron Throne for FIVE FUCKING BOOKS, in which she mainly falls in love with people, loses them, and dithers around dealing with slavery (white savior syndrome, yup). Aside from maintaining her position of power (owing to her ownership of three powerful dragons) she doesn't do much.
And at this point, the only unmolested girl child, Arya, has essentially ceded from the
I'm going off on a tangent here. My reactions to Martin's work is frequently complicated by the fact that he might be a competent writer, but he is not a great writer. He frequently squanders a good lede. I wish his editors had not been asleep at the wheel (or maybe they weren't, and this was as close to good as they could get) and had helped him with some of the laggy sections. Or how about his recurring problem of closing the book with a good, satisfying, cliffhanger-y bang, and then following it up with the most draggy, awful, pointless Epilogue you've ever read? So I frequently feel like I'm interpreting two levels of Martin: one is his mediocre talent as a writer, which is okay but not that great, and the other level is his entrenched sexism and racism, which he appears to have reined in a tiny bit in the intervening years (Book one was begun in 1991, published in 1996) but not by enough to make me believe he fundamentally believes in equality, by any stretch of the imagination.
Finally, Rosenberg's issue with Doyle's writing: "[Doyle]’s set up a paradigm where only her sense that the scenes of sexual assault in George R.R. Martin’s novels are inappropriately arousing counts. No one else’s experiences reading the books are valid" ...which I would argue is not explicitly a point of Doyle's piece at all. But! Actually! This reinforces some of the points that Rosenberg makes -- i.e. that where some people see only rape, others see "[Baratheon] reinforces his patheticness and gives some nuance to her subsequent sexual affairs"...and Rosenberg sees Doyle's piece as obviating all other critical and feminist (or non-feminist) responses to the piece, which is not not something I see explicitly or implicitly a part of Doyle's review. (So yes, now we have a feminist interpreting a feminist's reaction to another feminist, and here's where the snake swallows its tail and we can all affirm the importance of critical dialogues, yes? Okay.) The point is that Rosenberg sees Doyle's opinion as stepping on her (Rosenberg's) toes, which I feel is a lot to do with Rosenberg and not a whole lot to do with Doyle. So where do we take responsibility for the effect of our (angry, loud, feminist) words? And where do we stop to reevaluate the effect of our (privileged, entrenched, racist, sexist) words to find better ways to communicate?
As a feminist reader of fantasy (and other books, but wearing my fantasy consumer hat today) I have to say it is tremendously satisfying that there are two published viewpoints and a healthy debate going about this. As readers, we deserve more, and more frequent, and more nuanced discussions about these issues in books. But I am not happy to see Doyle's excellent (if cheeky) analysis trivialized or dismissed in ways that reinforce the author's race and gender privilege while refusing to interrogate the reader's privilege in interpreting same. Readers (and writers!) are capable and deserve better and more nuanced discussions on gender and race based privilege.
[Another time, I would love to talk about the other supposedly-feminist historical fantasy piece Rosenberg mentions, Marion Zimmer Bradley's Mists of Avalon, which I loved loved loved as a budding pagan hippie child of 14 but subsequently re-read and was pretty shocked to find it a problematic piece...you can affirm the mystic pagan goddess power all day long but when your main priestess lady has deep self-loathing when she has sex? Problematic! Lots of stuff like that, as I recall from rereading it two or three years ago. Has anyone else reread this as an adult and had similar thoughts?]
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 10:47 am (UTC)I was talking about this last night, & yeah-- like you say, I'm glad there is discussion. I certainly don't think A Song of Ice & Fire is above reproach. What I don't think, however, is that it deserves condemnation.
I think he's better than mediocre as a writer, as well-- he's not writing in the literary genre, but he combines the energy of the pulps with the obsession of the blockbuster. That is good writing, even if it isn't lit.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 12:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:36 pm (UTC)Also. Can't it be condemned and loved? I still want to know what happens to these (occasionally awful) characters, even though they are embedded in this terrible construct which is occasionally painful to read.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:39 pm (UTC)In a comment on TM someone asked about Angela Carter...have you read her or no?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:48 pm (UTC)But now I'm talking about systemic problems in critique, not Doyle's piece or even Martin's work. THE WORM CONTINUES TO EAT ITSELF.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 03:54 pm (UTC)The thing is, Martin's treatment of rape and pedophilia is pretty sexualized. How is that an engagement with those topics? It's an exploitation, in my view. That's why it's problematic. There is male gaze running rampant through the books. I'd love to see a more detailed literary critique style investigation of this, maybe someone has written one already?
If he was engaging these themes? I don't think you'd see as much of a feminist backlash.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 05:33 pm (UTC)Also, here is a crucial point for me-- the difference between critique & criticism. The statement that discussion & examining gender & race in Game of Thrones is different than condemnation because of your (Doyle's) interpretation. You know?
You are right that it could be a much more subversive addressing of those faults-- but I think with characters like Briene you ARE seeing his critique of misogyny, & the powerlessness of Sansa, & the reflection in Caitlyn, ARE condemnations of patriarchy.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 05:53 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I understand the point you're making here about the difference between critique and criticism...can you clarify?
Brienne is my least favorite example, actually, because of how frequently it is hammered home the connection between her strength and knightly prowess and her severe ugliness. Not that I want everyone to be pretty all the time (intrigued how they'll do this in the series...I hope they go more "she is unreal" rather than "she is hideous") but because Martin seems to confuse the line between 'ugly' and 'unworthy' which seems to be extremely salient for Brienne but not really mentioned for most of the other characters. Is it important that she's ugly because she was highborn? Is this a critique? He creates an ugly person who is threatened for their ugliness despite their heroic nature; it feels very Society Is Shallow 101 to me. I love Brienne but I feel like I have to pick and choose things I pay attention to in her chapters -- because a lot of it is pretty lazy, like her pointless "has anyone seen Sansa" chapters which feel to me like a poor reflection of her intelligence AND a lazy author.
Partly I see the whole Brienne Is Ugly thing magnified is because of one of his mediocre-writer tricks, which is to fall back on certain phrases almost as a tic -- he does this with Tyrion and with Brienne especially -- it's almost as if he's consulting a list and every two paragraphs we must have a reference to Tyrion scratching his nose scar or Tyrion's sore legs, or Brienne's ugly face -- this is especially awful in the most recent book. Rather than getting a picture of these characters, I feel like the repetition becomes a stand-in for actual character development. I feel we are seeing how other people see these characters, rather than how they might see themselves. That is the biggest disconnect for me, especially in the female character chapters -- the authorial distance does them no favors.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 06:03 pm (UTC)You're right about the tricks of the ticks.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-01 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 06:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 08:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-14 08:52 pm (UTC)