Book Club - January

In this special session, Shed member and book club hero, Tobi Evans will lead us in a discussion of his new book, Reimagining Masculinity and Violence in Game of Thrones and Songs of Fire and Ice.

If you love queer readings of pop culture texts or you're a fan of Game of Thrones or the books behind the series, this one's for you!

Content warning: strong violence in all forms. So definitely skip this one if that's not for you.

Author's blurb:

In this examination of violence and masculinity in George R. R. Martin's fantasy series A Song of Ice and Fire and its television adaptation Game of Thrones, Tobi Evans offers a queer reading that revises the idea that the texts glorify violence. Moving from monstrous men characters and sovereigns to female, disabled, and genderqueer masculinities, Violent Fantasies understands the novels and television series to offer a complex and ambiguous negotiation of different types of violence.

Deploying queer feminist poststructuralist and psychoanalytic approaches to the acts of violence that masculine characters use, Evans views hegemonic violence as part of a destructive cycle wherein characters use violence to dominate others but have their violence turned against them in such a way that their bodies become disgusting and they are unable to enter into systems of patriarchal reproduction. The only characters who succeed in proliferating their values and knowledges are those who use violence to care for others. These characters are also threatened with a bodily undoing when they use violence, but their bodily borders are secured because of their connections to others and their queer kinship bonds. Violence transforms the body, Evans argues, in ways that are both circular and ideologically ambivalent.

Full book available here: Reimagining Masculinity and Violence in 'Game of Thrones' and 'A Song of Ice and Fire'

If the readings feel like more than your brain or budget can handle, no worries just check out a few episodes of or clips from Game of Thrones.

**You do not need to read the texts to come to book club - we get together to talk gender, culture and life and to support and affirm each other as amazing humans**