Lessons from Westeros: Gender and power in Game of Thrones
| Author | Laura J Shepherd,William Clapton |
| DOI | 10.1177/0263395715612101 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Research Articles |
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(1) 5 –18
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0263395715612101
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Lessons from Westeros:
Gender and power in
Game of Thrones
William Clapton and Laura J Shepherd
UNSW Australia
Abstract
People learn about global politics not (solely or even mostly) from conventional teaching in the
discipline of International Relations (IR) but from popular culture. We use the television series
Game of Thrones to expand upon this premise. We show how representations of the gendered
foundations of political authority can be found in popular culture in ways that challenge the division
of such knowledge in IR. Game of Thrones and other cultural texts potentially enable different
ways of thinking about the world that subvert both the disciplinary mechanisms that divide up
knowledge and the related marginalisation of various knowledge claims.
Keywords
Game of Thrones, global politics, IR theory, pedagogy, popular culture
Received: 2 January 2015; revised version received: 9 June 2015; accepted: 15 June 2015
The distribution of power, the ever-present threat of conflict, claims to authority and
vehement counter-claims, not to mention weapons of mass destruction (in the form of
dragons): it is no wonder that those scholars of International Relations (IR) who turn
periodically to popular culture for inspiration and vehicles for analysis have identified
HBO’s hit television series Game of Thrones as a fruitful site of enquiry. There have been
analytical investigations of whether we can ‘see’ IR theory in the show (Drezner, 2011,
2012, 2013; Saideman, 2013), for example, and, if we can, whether it unproblematically
depicts logics of political realism (Carpenter, 2012); there has even been a call to investi-
gate the ways in which ‘its fictional memes, concepts or allegories infuse or inform real-
world politics, political phenomena or political debate’ (Carpenter, 2014). We agree that
Game of Thrones deserves such careful analytical investigation. The themes and issues
with which the series engages mean that the subject matter of the show and the subject
matter of IR are closely related. As with any popular cultural phenomenon, it is interest-
ing to explore not only the specific lessons that can be learned from interrogating the
forms of representational practice it employs but also the more general possibilities that
Corresponding author:
Laura J Shepherd, School of Social Sciences, UNSW Australia, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
Email: l.j.shepherd@unsw.edu.au
612101POL0010.1177/0263395715612101PoliticsClapton and Shepherd
research-article2016
Research Article
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