Jaime Hovey

Tyrions gallantry
Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough,
that indeed something is missing.
Jos Muoz
Where are . . . my dragons?
Jonathan Van Ness, stylist
Can we imagine an ethical queer future? Some queer theorists have
suggested that the compulsion to behave ethically, especially as it is figured
culturally as a duty towards children, is a heteronormative and reproductive
mandate that queers must reject; others argue that we cannot imagine a
queer future devoid of ethical longing. Lee Edelman has famously insisted
that queerness names the side of those not fighting for the children, those
refusing the false ethics of a compulsory compassion that too often becomes
the vise-like grip of dutys iron fist.1 Rejecting Edelmans call for no future,
Jos Muoz argues that the queer future is not yet here, or not yet realised,
but is nevertheless still present as a desire for an ideality that can be distilled
from the past.2 Muoz is referring to the recent past of twentieth-century
queer politics, but his notion of an historical ethical queer consciousness
provides a useful lens for reading George R.R. Martins fantasy saga A Song
of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, both of which
try to imagine an ethical political future that revisits the sexual and gender
codes of the past and rejects traditional reproductive futurity, yet fosters an
ethics of compassion. Drawing on historical codes of love to suggest that
political possibility emerges when queerness contests what seems natural,
Martins story of a young queen whose assumption of leadership brings
dragons to life is a fable about the difficulty of realising a queer future that is
already here but requires more than the mere formalities of love.
Set in an imaginary feudal society replete with knights and chivalry,
Martins epic references ideals of courtly romance as part of an ongoing
conversation about political ethics, gender, and sexuality central to character
development and the storys larger trajectory. Instead of offering children and
traditional kinship structures as social and political ideals, Martin emphasises
the role of compassion a feeling with that arises from outsider status in
imagining a new polity. As Martin shows, the romantic ideals of courtly love
devotion, deference, gallantry, and beauty are often invoked in the story
to reinforce and cover over violent forms of misogyny and normativity. Yet

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characters with different bodies and genders also occupy a contingent position
with respect to romantic ideologies of courtliness, and possess the potential
to undo them and imagine new kinds of personal and political relationships.
Although representations of courtly love in medieval Europe focused
predominantly on malefemale desire, styles of gallantry and courtesy
associated with courtliness have been read for centuries as both feminist and
queer. Preceding the establishment of companionate marriage as a modern
Western cultural ideal, historical courtly romance was adulterous,
nonreproductive, and often unconsummated, a queer kind of heterosexuality
where men served women through elaborate public and private forms of
gendered courtesy. The roots of queer Camp can be found in the excessive
gestures of the courtier, exemplified by the dandyism and arch wit of Oscar
Wilde,3 and twentieth-century lesbian versions of butch-femme often adopted
the self-conscious gender styles of courtly romance.4 These queer figurations
of courtly love suggest that its illicit romantic posturing enables more
subversive modes of gender, power, and sexuality.
In Martins fictional Westeros, courtly love instantiates the storys
foundational political instability: the kidnapping and rape of the legendary
beauty Lyanna Stark by Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, the already-married heir
to the throne whose extraordinary physical beauty, noble bearing, musical
ability, poetic talent, and military prowess mark him as the quintessential
courtier and knight. At the start of Martins epic, the Targaryen line has been
exiled and nearly destroyed as a result of Rhaegars rape. Lyannas brother,
Ned Stark, and Lyannas intended, Robert Baratheon, have sacked the capital
and placed Robert on the throne, but Roberts grief at Lyannas death has led
him to drunkenness and whoring, and he shows little interest in ethical
governance. In retaliation for Roberts sexual brutality and licentiousness, his
new wife Cersei, whose twin brother Jaime is her lover, rears Jaimes children
as her husbands heirs and arranges Roberts murder. Ned Stark brings home
Jon Snow, a boy he acknowledges as his bastard son but who may in fact be
the secret child of Rhaegar and Lyanna.5 Despite the appearance of hypocrisy,
he begins gathering evidence of Cerseis adultery, and is executed by Cerseis
son Joffrey Baratheon, scattering the Stark family.
As these events show, the sexual double standard is one of the sternest
principles of Westerosi culture, indicative of its deep inequalities. In A Song
of Ice and Fire the feudal subjects behaviour towards women shapes both his
moral code and his fate. As Caroline Spector argues in Power and Feminism
in Westeros, the tribulations suffered by female characters in the novels play
a central role in illustrating the disconnect between the societys illusions
about itself and the harrowing reality.6 These illusions gain traction through
courtly chivalrys codes, which naturalise social differences between
characters by justifying gross inequality as ethical, natural, and even politically

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desirable. In Martins saga strong men are supposed to be strong in order to
protect women and the weak; rich men rich so they can help the poor;
powerful men rulers so they may lead and restore order; and beautiful men
and women seen as such because their beauty is indicative of nobility and
inner virtue. In reality, most strong or powerful men in the novels pillage the
countryside, kill the poor for sport, rape women, and seek power for its own
sake.
Martin teaches us to read chivalry with a critical eye while never entirely
losing sight of its ideals, and his best characters also learn to see through the
reified illusions of romantic chivalry that justify vicious gender violence,
hatred of unusual bodies, enforced sexual normativity, authoritarianism and
militarism, and hierarchies of wealth. Brent Hartinger points out in A
Different Kind of Other that A Song of Ice and Fire has many characters
considered freakish in some way, with at least half of the point of view
characters occupying the social margins because of their gender, sexuality,
disability, or other embodiment conditions such as dwarfism or obesity.7 In
this sense, Tyrion Lannister is one of the most important characters in Ice and
Fire because his perspective as a dwarf helps him see behind the romance of
courtly love, or more specifically, what psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan terms the
imitation of an imitation of courtly artifices gender roles.8 Tyrion rejects
romantic notions of gallantry because they celebrate normal kinds of
embodiment, and his refusal of compulsory gender springs from his physical
inability to approximate its terms. But he also cultivates courtly loves outsider
ethics, seeing in its celebration of illicit desire the kind of emotional and
political feelings that bind people together. This opens his heart to others,
engendering in him a voluntary compassion that is the beginning of real
human connection.

The knights of summer

The vocabulary of courtly love governs many of the relationships in the novels
between men and women, and sometimes extends to other kinds of
relationships as well. Courtly ideals historically prized physical prowess and
heterosexual devotion. According to Andreas Capellanus, whose The Art of
Courtly Love was influenced by the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, a lover
should always offer his services and obedience freely to every lady, and he
ought to root out all his pride and be very humble.9 Courtly gallantry was
demonstrated as a willingness to be in a couple: by a carriage and a way of
walking that please the beloved, by a readiness to say pretty things.10
Flourishing in the presence of obstacles such as the scoldings and beatings
that lovers suffer from their parents,11 desire for the woman became a public
devotion akin to religious worship. The anguish of the lover was channelled

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into feats of physical prowess that belied emotional effort; as Baldassare

Castiglione famously suggests in his sixteenth-century dialogue The Book of
the Courtier, masculine bearing required a sprezzatura [nonchalance] . . . to
conceal all art and make whatever is done and said appear to be without effort
and almost without any thought about it.12
This idealisation of the beloved women was adopted in nineteenth-century
Anglo-American culture as a component of heterosexual companionate
marriage, while courtly style also provided contemporary queer patients of
psychoanalysis with a denaturalised vocabulary of antinomian sexual desire
and gendered behaviour. Sigmund Freud, in his 1920 paper Psychogenesis of
a Case of Female Homosexuality, noted the adoption of the courtly lover role
as one that afforded lesbian patients an intelligible position with respect to the
beloved: she manifested the humility and the tremendous over-estimation of
the sexual object so characteristic of the male lover, she renounced all
narcissistic satisfaction, and she preferred to be the lover rather than the
beloved. She had thus not only chosen a feminine love object, but had also
developed a masculine attitude towards this object.13
Freud is not suspicious of courtly love itself so much as sceptical about his
patients queer masculine position of lover. But that position is what enables
her to feel love in the first place: adopting the queer comportment proper to
the courtly lover, she tells Freud she could not conceive of any other way of
being in love.14 In other words, adopting a queer position with respect to
courtly love allows her to love, period.
Jacques Lacan was considerably more suspicious of courtly ideals, viewing
them as a barrier to self-knowledge rather than a viable ethics. Lacan sees the
cruel Lady, whom the lover asks for mercy in the classic courtly love scenario,
as a reified allegory or function depersonalized and emptied of all real
substance,15 and defines courtly love as a fraud and an altogether refined way
of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who
put an obstacle to it.16 Here devotion to an unattainable Lady is merely an
alibi, one offering an image of wholeness and completion to the subject that
forecloses examination of darker truths about gender, power, and sexual
relationships. The poetry of courtly love, Lacan writes, tends to locate in the
place of the Thing certain discontents of the culture.17
So in these two psychoanalytic takes on courtly love we have two very
different ethical outcomes. Freud shows courtliness as a queer vocabulary and
comportment through which love can come into being and be expressed;
Lacan fears that its terms obfuscate the truth of sexual and gender relations,
limiting the ability of people to feel the encounter. Both of these are true:
Lacan saw that it was possible to see beyond the illusion, into the sources of
violence and oppression certain discontents of the culture masked by
courtly chivalrys rules of conduct towards women and the weak and helpless.

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In playing out a certain art of gender roles, as courtliness does, one can see
beyond the artifice of gender roles that courtly love plays out, the imitation of
an imitation that is sprezzatura, gallantry, courtesy.18 Both Freuds and
Lacans readings suggest that courtly love itself might offer a reading of the
truth that lies beneath it, and an ethics that would be a response to such a
reading.
Ethical gallantry, then, might be gallantry with a difference, showing effort,
failure, or emotion, whose performance varies from the usual just enough to
re-establish it on different terms. Ethical ladyhood, likewise, might show
mercy or real compassion, rather than merely inhabiting its forms as a kind
of social armour. Judith Butler theorised a queer critique of gender as
something like this, where gender imitation as drag masquerade enacts
insubordinate resistance to the norm by means of repetition, parodic
difference, and excess.19 But resistant forms of gender and embodiment are not
always performed in ways that call attention to excess. Masculinity is often
reticent, deferent, and understated. Castigliones ideal of a nonchalant
sprezzatura stresses the courtiers impassivity, which equalled not only
freedom from external bodily movements like labor, but freedom from
internal bodily movements like emotionality and awkwardness.20 Being
gallant with a difference might resist this norm of masculine reticence by
showing effort, compassion, and love instead of nonchalant detachment or
impassivity.
Conventional romantic notions of chivalry and gallantry are devoutly
upheld in A Song of Ice and Fire by two characters occupying divergent
positions on the gender spectrum: the conventionally feminine Sansa Stark,
a young girl who wants to be adored by knights and princes; and the
masculine-identified Brienne of Tarth, who wants to be the knight who serves
and adores. Sansa believes in chivalry and traditional gender roles,
maintaining that A ladys armor is courtesy.21 She believes that handsome
princes are gallant and beautiful queens are kind; as a result, she reveals her
fathers plans to flee from Kings Landing to Queen Cersei, who arrests him.
Even after her son Joffrey beheads her father, she retains her belief in true
chivalry; when Joffrey has her publicly beaten and partially stripped naked by
his knights, she rationalises that he and his men are the exception: Knights
are sworn to defend the weak, protect women, and fight for the right, but none
of them did a thing . . . I hate them too, Sansa thought. They are no true knights,
not one of them.22 Sansa circles around her story of chivalry without ever
seeing that it is her belief in the illusion of chivalry as the true story about
men, women, and power that has hurt her, and made her vulnerable to being
brutalised by the very people she believes will save her.
Brienne of Tarth enters the narrative on the other side of the courtly
equation, as genderqueer knight to Sansas normatively cisgendered Lady.

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Dressed in male armour that hides her identity, Brienne proves victorious in
the melee over 116 knights, unhorsing even Loras Tyrell, the realms most
romantic figure and paragon of young chivalry. Brienne is revealed to readers
through the point of view character of Catelyn Stark, who meets her when she
comes to parley with one of the contenders for the Iron Throne, Renly
Baratheon. Although Briennes freckled face and crooked teeth have inspired
her cruel nickname Brienne the Beauty, Catelyn views her as redeemed by her
courtly dignity and enthusiastic masculinity: Pity filled Catelyns heart. Is there
any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman? And yet . . . Brienne
of Tarth did not look unfortunate. Her smile lit up her face, and her voice was
strong and proud.23 Through Catelyn we see that Brienne and the rest of
Renlys hosts are too young to see beyond the romantic myths of chivalry: It
is all a game to them still, a tourney writ large, and all they see is the chance
for glory and honor and spoils. They are boys drunk on song and story, and
like all boys, they think themselves immortal.24 When Brienne asks Catelyn
why she pities them, Catelyn tells her, Because they are the knights of summer,
and winter is coming.25
The motto of House Stark is Winter is Coming. Catelyn Starks invocation
of this motto in this context is a dark warning about the myths of chivalry,
suggesting the necessity of looking behind romantic illusions in order to
grapple with the bleak realities beneath. But Brienne doesnt understand what
Catelyn is telling her, and invokes gallantry as a kind of Keatsian aesthetic:
Winter will never come for the likes of us. Should we die in battle, they will
surely sing of us, and its always summer in the songs. In the songs all knights
are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining.26 Briennes
adoption of the masculine position in the courtly relation allows her to
sidestep femininity entirely, but this also helps her avoid seeing underneath
the courtly gender ideals that foster war. Instead of looking to her own
embodiment as proof that the myths might be wrong, that all knights might
not be gallant because all maids are not, in fact, beautiful, she changes
position, and becomes a gallant knight. Rather than question gallantrys
normative terms, she struggles to uphold them, and finds a way into chivalry
that feels possible to her.
Brienne chooses not to queer courtly love by directly challenging it, but she
fails at nonchalance. Her gallantry requires a great deal of effort: Out of
armor, her body seemed ungainly, broad of hip and thick of limb, with
hunched muscular shoulders but no bosom to speak of. And it was clear from
her every action that Brienne knew it, and suffered for it. She spoke only in
answer, and seldom lifted her gaze from her food.27 Catelyns point of view
renders Brienne a freak, neither graceful man nor buxom woman, and shows
the effort and discomfort Brienne experiences as a genderqueer person in a
normative society. Upon Renlys death, Brienne transfers her loyalty to

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Catelyn, enhancing her courtly masculine identification by devoting herself to
a Lady. Briennes movement into alternative positions in the courtly relation
foregrounds the roles of gallant knight and pretty maid as denaturalised
positions rather than essential or biological ones. But her unwillingness to
interrogate her romantic notions of chivalry also marks her in the text as a
figure that will suffer, as Sansa does, for her ideals.

Tall as a king
Sometimes non-normative bodies and desires can help subjects recognise that
the vocabulary of courtly love and chivalry is not available to them. This forces
them to refashion an ethical code that opens them to compassionate
encounters with others. This position is not one without suffering. In one of
the more affecting moments in Martins A Storm of Swords, the third book in
A Song of Ice and Fire, Martin shows how the dwarf Tyrion Lannister stands
outside these codes, constituting a resistant gallantry that is not dependent on
them. Tyrion is humiliated at his own wedding because of normative
assumptions about masculine courtliness, but he refuses to disregard the
injustice of what is happening to him, and he refuses to replicate the
hierarchical gender codes that figure him as freakish and queer. Son of the
wealthy and powerful Tywin Lannister, brother to Queen Cersei Baratheon,
Tyrion should exploit the patriarchal power given Westerosi men in his social
position. However, because he is a dwarf, his father hates him, and refuses to
name him his heir. Tyrions appearance makes others fear and misunderstand
him: Lysa Arryn accuses him of killing her husband; Catelyn Stark is
convinced he pushed her son Bran from a window; and Cersei Baratheon
believes he poisoned her son Joffrey, and will some day kill her. When Jon
Snow, bastard son of Ned Stark, first meets him, he cant help comparing
Tyrion unfavourably to his Lannister siblings, judging him by physical
appearance alone: All that the gods have given to Cersei and Jaime, they had
denied Tyrion. He was a dwarf, half his brothers height, struggling to keep
pace on stunted legs. His head was too large for his body, with a brutes
squashed-in face beneath a swollen shelf of a brow. One green eye and one
black one peered from under a lank fall of hair so blond it seemed white.28
Tyrion Lannister has never had access to reproductive futurity, so his life
has almost always had to be about something else. Early in Tyrions life, his
father forecloses his opportunities for cross-class companionate marriage with
a horrifying act of sexual violence. When Tyrion meets the crofters daughter
Tysha and marries for love, his father conspires with his brother Jaime to
discredit her, claiming she is a whore they bought to provide him with his first
sexual experience. Convincing him of the lie that her love is merely
transactional, their father compels Tyrion and Jaime to participate in a gang

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rape where Tysha is paid for every man until at the end she had so many silvers
the coins were slipping through her fingers and rolling on the floor.29 In a cruel
parody of the family motto A Lannister always pays his debts, Tywin makes
Tyrion go last, and pay Tysha with a gold coin.
The fact that Tyrion feels compelled to tell this story over and over suggests
that he knows at some level that understanding it contains a revelation that
eludes him. Here Martin skewers duty as a scene of horror and barbarism. The
parody of duty enacted by the gang rape reveals the Lannister family ethos,
and the lesson Tywin teaches his children is that all human relationships
especially those with women are reducible to monetary transactions, with
the most brutal inequalities of class and gender secured by sexual violence.
Tyrion internalises Tywins lesson for most of his young life, seeking out
prostitutes for sex because he believes no one else will love him. But he has
difficulty keeping these relationships impersonal, and often falls in love,
reminding himself Shes a whore, damn you, its your coin she loves, not your
cock. Remember Tysha?30
Tyrion may be fond of repeating his family motto A Lannister always
pays his debts as a way of making it seem as if his compassionate acts are
merely compulsory, but his generosity is consistent, and his kindnesses are
almost always voluntary, refashioning that motto in such a way as to show he
knows he owes other people not only monetary debts, but compassion,
decency, and respect. When Bran Stark is crippled in a fall, Tyrion designs a
saddle for him so that he can be tall. He doesnt do this because Bran is a child
and he feels a compulsory duty towards him as a figure of futurity, but because
his heart has been opened by the ways in which his body has exiled him from
the dignity of the normal: I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples and
bastards and broken things, Tyrion explains to Brans brother Robb.31
Because they fear him, Tyrions father, sister, and nephew use his body to
humiliate him. When his father Tywin arranges a political marriage for him
to Sansa Stark, his family sniggers as he struggles to wrap her in the ritual
wedding cloak that signifies his traditional role as her husband and protector:
Sansa felt a sharp tug on her skirt. He wants me to kneel, she realized,
blushing. She was mortified. It was not supposed to be this way. She had
dreamed of her wedding a thousand times, and always she had pictured
how her betrothed would stand behind her tall and strong, sweep the
cloak of his protection over her shoulders, and tenderly kiss her cheek
as he leaned forward to fasten the clasp.32
Sansa lacks compassion for Tyrion because of her investment in what
Rosemarie Garland Thomson has termed the normate, defined as the
constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and

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cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield
the power it grants them.33 Sansa insists on her fantasy of an able-bodied
courtly lover, ignoring Tyrions insistent tugs on her dress until she sees the
little man . . . gazing up at her, his mouth tight, his face as red as her cloak,
and feels ashamed. Acting the cruel Lady to Tyrions wretched knight, she
refuses compassion until she is shamed by her own lack of generosity.
In marked contrast to Tyrion, the figure who is tall and strong at Sansa
Starks wedding is Joffrey Baratheon, Sansas sadistic former fianc, murderer
of her father Ned, and Tyrions nephew, who swept her maidens cloak away
with a kingly flourish and a grin while surreptitiously fondling her breast.
Joffrey succeeds precisely where Tyrion fails in the marriage ceremony,
approximating Castigliones perfect courtier, who should be well built and
shapely of limb and show strength and lightness and suppleness, and know
all the bodily exercises that befit a warrior.34 Yet Joffreys use of gallantry to
deflect attention away from his disrespectful groping of Sansa is emblematic
of chivalrys masquerade in Westeros, which gestures towards ethical
relationships while masking and enabling abusive ones.
Sansas romantic belief in chivalry makes her unable to discern the
differences between her weddings rigged staging of gallant protection,
designed to make Tyrion fail, and an earlier moment of vulnerability at
Joffreys hands, when Tyrion actually rescues and cloaks her. When Joffrey
has Sansa beaten and stripped in retaliation for her brother Robbs victory over
the Lannister forces, it is Tyrion who invokes the spirit of chivalry to shame
him: What sort of knight beats helpless maids? . . . Someone give the girl
something to cover herself with.35 Even though Sansa shames him, Tyrion
continues to protect her; when Joffrey insists there will be a bedding ceremony
at Tyrions wedding, Tyrion spares Sansa this further degradation by defying
Joffrey outright: Her dwarf husband . . . slammed his dagger down in the
table, where it stood quivering. Then youll service your bride with a wooden
prick. Ill geld you, I swear it.36
Although Sansas point of view here characterises Tyrion as a physically
and socially freakish dwarf husband, his furious refusal to allow Sansa to be
further humiliated by Joffrey artfully contrasts Tyrions real courtesy with
Joffreys bullying. Indeed, Tyrions most important ethical moment may be
when he refuses to consummate his marriage with Sansa because she does not
want it: My lady, Tyrion said, you are lovely, make no mistake, but . . . I
cannot do this. My father be damned.37 Although he desires her, he opts not
to take what is his under patriarchal law. This refusal to rape Sansa, who at
13 is exactly the same age as poor Tysha was when he married her, seems to
set him apart from the boy he was then, and sets him on a different course from
the one his father wanted him to follow. Although unswervingly heterosexual
in his desires, Tyrions ambivalence about patriarchal masculinity is deeply

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queer, and here he begins to distance himself from the casual appropriation
of women that is the birthright of Westerosi lords. Indeed, his queerness lies,
as Sansa notes, in the fact that almost nothing about him represent that law
at all: Where his legs joined, his mans staff poked up stiff and hard from a
thicket of coarse yellow hair, but it was the only thing about him that was
straight.38
Tyrion fails to successfully perform courtly gallantry within the terms Sansa
and others imagine because he lacks the physical body that might reassure
them of the consistency of one type of normate embodiment. Nevertheless,
his sardonic bearing constitutes a resistant masculinity, one that enacts the
ethical behaviour of gallantry with a difference. Drawing on his own
experience as a physical outcast, Tyrion counsels Ned Starks bastard son Jon
Snow to use the illegitimacy that stigmatises him to his advantage, to make a
difference in the world: Never forget what you are, for surely the world will
not. Make it your strength. Then it can never be your weakness. Armor yourself
in it and it will never be used against you.39 Normative ideals offer nothing to
Tyrion, whose differently coloured eyes suggest his ability to see things from
varied and variant perspectives. His pragmatism, true bravery, and
compassion help others read against the normative bias of chivalric ideals, and
lend him enormous dignity. When he gently suggests to the bastard Jon Snow
that their stigmatised bodies might have value if they each reject normative
constructions of status All dwarfs are bastards in their fathers eyes . . . yet
not all bastards need be dwarfs Jon perceives that for just a moment Tyrion
Lannister stood tall as a king.40

Where are . . . my dragons?

Although Tyrion teaches us to read through chivalrys hypocrisies, he is also
subject to its highest gender ideals, and his queer heroic journey requires that
he shed the last vestiges of a violent masculinity in his devotion to something
greater than himself. He fails in this when he murders his father and his lover
Shae, reminding readers that as a Westerosi lord, Tyrion is also a creature of
chivalrys dark side. In the last complete book of the series, A Dance with
Dragons, Martin suspends Tyrion after the murders in the middle of what one
hopes is a redemptive journey towards Daenerys Targaryen. Daenerys is still
something of a myth in Westeros, figured as a Lady, but imbued with political
possibility. Daenerys is important as a potential queen and a potential ally
for Tyrion because she is a woman who has been an outsider. Psychologically
and physically abused by her older brother, who sells her to a warlord as part
of his quest to be king, Daenerys intimately understands the forms of violence
that accompany political power. Because of this, she emerges as a woman
interested in just rule.

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Tyrions retributive murder of his father and his lover Shae for sleeping
together and conspiring to kill him means he must seek out Daenerys as his
Lady, if only so that service to her might redeem him as an ethical person, and
throughout A Dance with Dragons we see him undergoing the courtly knights
traditional trials of battle and humiliation as he travels towards her. A queer
figure because of her fierce, autonomous femininity, Daenerys as Mother of
Dragons substitutes the political futurity of dragons hatched from petrified
eggs for the reproductive futurity of the children she cannot bear. Daenerys
becomes the Mother of Dragons because she believes in her Targaryen destiny
as a dragonlord; however, the hatchlings unruliness jeopardises her ideals of
nonviolent rule, and she makes the difficult decision to imprison them in order
to safeguard her subjects from their predatory foraging. Her struggle to do the
right thing despite the personal emotional cost makes her an admirable friend
for Tyrion, and his search for her is a sign of his potential as a character despite
his horrific strangling of Shae, the prostitute who suffers as yet another
throwaway woman victimised by brutal Lannister men.
In the third season of HBOs Game of Thrones, the internet comedy site
Funny or Die started a recap series that pays queer tribute to ethical queen
Daenerys Targaryen. Featuring real-life LA hair stylist Jonathan Van Ness,
who summarises each weeks episode for clients as he cuts their hair, Van
Nesss queer eye magnifies every camp possibility the series offers. Recognising
the diva-esque dimensions of Daenerys, Van Ness nicknames her character
Christina Aguilera and makes one of her lines into his signature sign-off:
Where are . . . my dragons? In episode 16, The Old Gods and the New,
Daenerys shouts this line when enemies steal the dragons, which are her main
source of political power. Van Ness gives her frantic question a queerly camp
delivery, adding a pregnant pause before my dragons, with emphasis on the
my that turns the line into a coolly delivered challenge: Where are . . . my
dragons!
When Daenerys utters that line in Game of Thrones, she has suffered
almost certain defeat at the hands of the Qartheen wizards who have stolen
her dragon children. With dragons, she inspires reverence and awe, making
people believe she is fated to regain the Targaryen throne. Without them, her
status is compromised, as is her ability to raise armies and money. Van Nesss
delivery of that line, tossing his hair like a supermodel in front of blowing fans
in a beauty salon, turns Daeneryss moment of near-absolute vulnerability and
defeat into a statement of diva-esque triumph. Playing up Daeneryss campy
title Mother of Dragons, Van Ness evokes the House Mothers in Jennie
Livingstons classic 1989 documentary about the legendary children of
voguing, Paris is Burning. In fact, to remind queer viewers that Daenerys is
the queer Mother of a very different kind of house, Funny or Die titled its
recap of The Children episode as Future Legendary Children, in an obvious

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homage to the queer families captured in Livingstons film, as well as an

explicit reminder of the drag ball voguing category of the same name. Van
Nesss query isnt a question, but a rereading and an affirmation that Future
Legendary Children are the future, but they are the future that is already here.
He faces the camera directly, a queen lip-synching a Queen, and reminds us
that fostering the past ideals of a queer future makes it come alive now.

Notes
1 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004), 68.
2 Jos Muoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York
University Press, 2009), 1.
3 With the bourgeois turn away from aristocratic masculine style in the seventeenth century,
courtly forms were rejected as effeminate. At the same time, queer subcultures adopted
mannered courtliness to resist normative definitions of gendered and sexual embodiment.
See Thomas A. King, Performing Akimbo: Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice,
in Moe Meyer (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (London: Routledge 1994), 2350,
and Moe Meyer, Under the Sign of Wilde: An Archeology of Posing, The Politics and
Poetics of Camp, 77.
4 See Karla Jay, The Amazon and the Page: Natalie Clifford Barney and Rene Vivien
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), and Jaime Hovey, Lesbian Chivalry in
Amy Lowells Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, in Adrienne Munich and Melissa Bradshaw
(eds), Amy Lowell, American Modern (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004),
778.
5 This theory appears in discussion threads in the Song of Ice and Fire Wiki, although
responses suggest a history to this theory that predates the forum (The Lyanna + Rhaegar =
Jon Thread, A Forum of Ice and Fire, 2 May 2006; http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/
topic/8085-the-lyanna-rhaegar-jon-thread/.
6 Caroline Spector, Power and Feminism in Westeros, in James Lowder (ed.), Beyond the
Wall: Exploring George R.R. Martins A Song of Ice and Fire, from A Game of Thrones to
A Dance With Dragons (Dallas: BenBella Books, 2012), 172.
7 Brent Hartinger, A Different Kind of Other: The Role of Freaks and Outcasts in A Song of
Ice and Fire, in Lowder, Beyond the Wall, 154.
8 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, bk 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
19591960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1997), 141.
9 Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love (New York: Norton, 1969), 152.
10 Ibid., 154.
11 Ibid.
12 Baldasar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Charles S. Singleton (New York:
Doubleday (Anchor), 1959), 43.
13 Sigmund Freud, The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality, International
Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1:2 (1920), 132.
14 Ibid., 131.
15 Lacan, Seminar, bk 7, 149.
16 Jacques Lacan, God and the Jouissance of The Woman, in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline
Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the cole Freudienne (New York:
Norton, 1985), 141.

98 | CRITICAL QUARTERLY , VOL. 57, NO. 1

17 Lacan, Seminar, bk 7, 150.
18 Ibid., 141.
19 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 137.
20 King, Performing Akimbo, 25.
21 George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings (1999; New York: Bantam, 2011), 50.
22 Ibid., 490.
23 Ibid., 344.
24 Ibid., 349.
25 Ibid., 350.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 348.
28 George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones (1996; New York: Bantam, 2011), 51.
29 Ibid., 458.
30 Martin, A Clash of Kings, 69.
31 Martin, A Game of Thrones, 244.
32 Ibid., 386.
33 Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Extraordinary bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in
American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 8.
34 Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, 37.
35 Martin, A Clash of Kings, 488.
36 Ibid., 390.
37 George R.R. Martin, A Storm of Swords (2000; New York: Bantam, 2011) 393.
38 Ibid.
39 Martin, A Game of Thrones, 57.
40 Ibid.

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