“These women can dominate!”: Rose Leslie on whether Game Of Thrones is sexist

Rose Leslie (Ygritte) has posted a video response to the question of whether she considers Game Of Thrones sexist over at uinterview. Unsurprisingly, she doesn’t believe so. “I would say that Game Of Thrones is at the forefront of…promoting strong, dominant women, particularly in a very brutal and ruthless world.”

She’s certainly not wrong about the show’s story often being the story of how women negotiate power in a society that attempts to withhold it from them. But in many ways, the show is still recovering from the narrative imposed upon it in initial critical reviews, when patriarchs like Ned Stark, Khal Drogo, and Robert Baratheon seemed to be the main characters. Their deaths opened the doors for a more diverse range of characters, especially women, to control their narrative agency. “There are powerful women who have armies at their back, and these women can dominate, and I feel that’s a wonderful platform.”

However, the second half of Leslie’s response is a little less successful….

When answering in terms of the brutality of the world, especially toward women, she says “There are these horrible scenes…within the books, and I feel the show is very loyal to the books.” Two of the show’s biggest controversies have occurred in scenes where the show took a sex scene that was oft-perceived as consensual in the novels and made it seem much less so on the screen: one in the pilot, and another more recently in Season 4.  This discussion is a complex one involving issues of adaptation, authorial intent, fan reaction, and cultural assumptions, though, and uinterview’s system seems to allocate just a single minute to these videos. So it’s unsurprising that Leslie didn’t do a full analysis.

• Published on 09/24/2014 at 5:37 PM CDT
• Last updated on 10/21/2016 at 12:40 PM CDT