Lessons from Westeros: Gender and power in Game of Thrones

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.