Cersei, Dany, and Tracy Flick

“Tracy Flick wins, which means (in the movie’s logic) that she really loses.”

“Do you remember Tracy Flick? She’s a main character in the 1999 Alexander Payne movie Election”

“misogyny is always already inside you, molding women into differently loathsome types. I”

“Election is also a little like season 7 of Game of Thrones, in that it’s a meditation on women in government and in that it’s both about misogyny and so deeply inside misogyny that watching it is often writhingly unpleasant.”

“There’s not really a Tracy Flick in Game of Thrones because the tidy and officious mode of feminine power Tracy represents is definitely a modern invention (or rather, my theory would be that the Victorians invented fantasy literature to counterbalance the desexualized mode of tidy and officious femininity that they were also, and at the same time, inventing: anyway, no one in a fantasy novel can be as simultaneously feminine and unhot as Tracy Flick).”

“But the problems she faces—how do you, as a woman, lead a country without making everyone hate you—are all of over Game of Thrones.”

“Cersei’s toxic femininity, these outfits tell us, is fully weaponized.”

“Dany imagines, all the time, men looking at her; their attention ripples through her every gesture.”

“Morality and sexuality occur for her simultaneously, and I’m not saying that’s totally a bad thing, I’m just saying that it’s what she’s doing: even at her strongest and most distant, she asks men to imagine her as available, even if not to them.”

“Noticing this is an interesting way to think about what worked and what didn’t in her scenes with Jon Snow: it’s not that they were bad, it’s just that they were sort of un-riveting, and one reason why is that the show doesn’t know how to make men interact with Dany if they aren’t falling in love with her—and Jon can’t fall in love with Dany because, although they don’t know this yet, he is her nephew. (He thinks it’s politics standing between them getting along; in fact the obstacles are gender norms and endogamy).”

“Election is precisely about the tension between mediocre men and talented women, the way that men want women’s talent to be loathsome when it’s not shaped for their desire”

“Tracy talks to male “advisors” just as Dany, Cersei, and Sansa do. Please remember how just last week Dany was in a war counsel surrounded entirely by other women, and please note how Game of Thrones could both hold that up as an accomplishment and then could not at all imagine how to make any of these women sustainable characters: they’re all dead or out of power now.”

“Lady Olenna is identical to her castle; although Dany’s troops take Casterly Rock, the taking of this “impregnable” fortress is both a direct result of Tyrion’s past sexual conquests and a replication of it.”

“The possible exception to all this is Sansa, who as Jon says is “starting to let on” how smart she is; watching Sansa be good at something and not be (immediately) punished for it is the sort of pleasure that we shouldn’t have to feel so grateful for Game of Thrones giving to us.”

“I loved how, in her scenes, the womanly arts of keeping a household fed and clothed are clearly displayed as of key military importance”

“why, if Missandei is as Tyrion says “Daenerys’s most trusted advisor,” is she not there more often when Dany and Tyrion talk? Where are women talking to other women?”

“Women, in Game of Thrones, do not wage war for territory; they are the territory.”

“Here’s where women, in this episode, are talking to other women: they are down in the dungeon, punishing each other, and each other’s children, for the way each has been wrapped up in struggles for power, which for the women in this show are always familial and sexual as well as political. Precisely to the extent that there is no way to separate women’s bodies from the territories fought over in war, there is no way for those women to separate their love for their children and their love for their lovers from the political violence around them.”

“Intimacy is fucked everywhere”

“which is why it’s so brilliantly horrifying when Cersei passionately kisses Tyene, collapsing categories we like to keep apart. Jealousy and pain and desire aren’t clean feelings, and the scene knows it; they’re fluid, like breastmilk and poison. They hurt, and they take time.”

“in the final moments of the dungeon scene, as we see Ellaria and Tyene straining against their chains to get at each other, I thought the show got at something true.”

“And one of the true things it gets at is that, as Election knows, people are terrible. Women, many of them, are terrible, and not just because of misogyny, but rather because they’re people: misogyny just provides a structure for their terribleness to take. What Cersei does, her cruelty, her selfishness, cannot be accounted for by feminism.”

“Game of Thrones is not like Election, really: it’s busy trying to figure out how to salvage some sense of heroism, of virtue, out of its messed up world, and Election thinks that ship sailed long ago.”

“But it’s interesting to compare the fantasies of Westeros to our other recent cultural stories about what women, white women particularly, can do with the power they have: not only The Beguiled but also Lady MacBeth and even Get Out.”

“Who do we hate, and why? What machinations can feminism allow us to rationalize, and which can it not? What are the forms we can tolerate women’s power taking? What even are the forms we can tolerate women taking?”