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Brienne and Femininity (and Masculinity)

I’ve been musing how one of the most important topics in Brienne's storyline is femininity, and even though her story isn't finished, we can fairly see what some of her major themes are around this—particularly, how performing or failing at performing femininity affects her both internally and externally.

Often I see people pointing out that, in spite of all of Brienne’s traditionally masculine ways—her clothes, her skill set, her body shape, to name a few—she does not fully reject femininity. That she likes little cute animals and fairy tales and wears dresses, and is shy and blushes frequently. This is an important point because, very often, fantasy settings made the assumption that a woman can only be taken seriously if she goes beyond “her womanhood” and acts and thinks “like a man,” as opposed to other girls who are too busy mending or wanting romance. Brienne challenges those tendencies that GRRM saw in his contemporaries. Things have changed a lot since (hello The Locked Tomb, for example), but you can still see where he is working from, and how many of the aspects of Brienne's story still resonate with more modern audiences because, well, sexism hasn't stopped existing. It's also important because the larger asoiaf and got fandoms often refuse to see this side of her, reducing her to a walking sword or a cardboard cut out of a pushover.

Now, my main issue here is that I feel several interpretations of Brienne have now gone on the other direction, and focus so much on Brienne PERFORMING traditional femininity—wearing luxurious dresses, using make up, accepting lavishing gifts, or wondering if she can be desired, for example—that we've gone sometimes on the opposite direction. I feel like many times we’re afraid or do not know how to approach characterizing her as someone who rejects aspects of femininity without making her into another “not like other girls” stereotype.

My two cents on the matter is that if we focus too much in what Brienne can't but "wants" to perform, we forget that she is, in fact, gladly rejecting some common impositions of femininity in her society.

Beginning with swordplay at a young age, for example, she was very glad to ditch a more traditional education in order to learn how to fight the way we know men are taught in asoiaf/got. She is also explicitly more comfortable in men's clothes. We all like the scene where Jaime makes an effort to give her a dress and she appreciates it, but we don't even find out what happened to the dress, because, presumably, the dress itself is not THAT important, at least not as much as the fact Jaime gave her gifts as a form of appreciation. Dresses have been used in Brienne's past to mock her (the event with the bear being the most recent one), and the important part is that Jaime is the only one who has given her one without that ulterior motive. The point of the scene is that where everyone undermines and underestimates her, he is acting the opposite way. We’re seeing how the relationship between them has evolved and that he is doing his best to mend what has happened and what he has done. She is given a dress and a sword as symbols that someone else in the story is beginning to appreciate her for all she is.

Beyond that, we even get details on the old shield Brienne got at Harrenhal, but not a word about the dress. Brienne explicitly doesn't really like being in dresses, she prefers mail and breeches, and feels more at ease in them than anything else. This is not her hating dresses because she is above them. I can’t remember well but as far as we know it’s just her preference: I don’t recall her saying she hates dresses, just that she prefers trousers. She must have been wearing dresses her whole life! It’s not likely she is unused to them. But we do know the act of being given a dress is important in Brienne’s story. The problem is not that they can’t make dresses for her, the problem is that everyone who forces her to wear a dress wants to signal how lacking she is as a woman, trying to fit her in a box too small for her real shape and then mocking her because she doesn’t meet their standard. The problem is they want to make her uncomfortable and they want to humiliate her, because she dares to exist in a way that doesn’t conform to patriarchal ideals. And the problem is that she likes to wear trousers and mail. She likes to wear masculine clothes, and they want her to be very aware of how much they disapprove.

And we also hear a great deal about marrying and having children out of duty. There's a certain loss she feels there because she believes that, at that point, all those missed opportunities will never present themselves again. All her life, she grew up with a dichotomy that dictated that the chance of having a family or children was through duty or none at all, because she is her father’s heir and—they kept telling her—nobody would want an ugly, masculine, temperamental girl as a wife. They could only want her for the money she brought. The point of the story is that, once again, failing the standards of femininity has forced her into a mentality where she thinks she can’t be loved because nobody would like who and what she is. But even then, even with that thorn in her mind, she still feels relieved she didn't have to perform these particular duties. The only thing she’s sad about is that she thinks she's missed any chance at having a family at all and will never know what that might be like. She doesn’t actively want babies or even to be married. She is still young, and at least to me, she seems to view these things in hypothetical rather than explicit goals or wants. She thinks that, at 20, there is no opportunity for her to experience these things because of how her society works. It’s the lack of choice that she mourns, down the line. But she rejects that particularly role that femininity imposes on her now. She didn’t want it, and she is happy it didn’t go through. She literally fought an old man to prove how much she didn’t want those impositions.

All this is interesting to me because Brienne also sort of thinks of herself as her father's son as well as her father's daughter. It almost slips her mouth once or twice. She is aware, I think, that many times the differences between a son and a daughter boil down not really to gender but to the sort of duty they perform. And she wants to do the sorts of things sons do, too. Men regularly learned to fight and wore the clothes she liked best and used hard-earned skills in a way she wanted to use them. There are layers to this (we’ll get to that in a bit) but she is, I think, very aware of her masculinity, and, if left to her own devices, she seems comfortable in it. The problem is she is NOT left to her own devices.

Most of Brienne's self doubt comes from outside forces. As a woman, they underestimate her. As a woman, they think she is stupid. As a gender non-conforming woman, every jape uttered goes directly to her womanhood. As a woman, if she looks the way she does and dresses the way she does and fights the way she does, when she expresses any vulnerable emotion, any shred of “femininity,” she is mocked for it. She likes dancing and beautiful things and pretty boys but a woman as masculine as she is is not the sort of person who gets to express those preferences without judgment from those around her.

The point is Brienne’s world wants her miserable either way: being unable to be a woman the way they demand of her, because she is too much “like a man” for it, or being unable to be a man, because she is too much a woman for that. The point is she can’t win regardless of what she does. Because that’s how sexism works.

But Brienne’s story is, I think, one about choices. The thing is that the world makes it harder for her, but she shouldn't have to be one thing or the other. She shouldn’t have to be defined by one or the other. If she wants to fight in the mud and smell roses and wear chain-mail and talk to charming men, she should be able to choose all of those things. I think it’s easy to focus too much in what aspects of femininity Brienne likes or dislikes instead of looking at what the story is proposing, which is to look at what Brienne,as a person, likes or dislikes. What she wants. Her parallel story to Jaime is about how the world will always try to put folks in boxes, especially those who, for some reason or another, do not easily fit in those boxes. The question is not “what feminine/masculine parts of Brienne is she happy performing” but rather “what does Brienne want, and why does she feel like she cannot get it and doesn't dare ask.”

This is also what drives her to servitude. There’s a phrase out there that says that if you don’t think you can be liked, you try to become useful, so at least there’s a reason to keep you around. It’s heartbreaking to see how Brienne’s vision of herself has been so skewed by the emotional abuse, parental neglect, and bullying she’s experienced since a young age. She doesn’t think anyone will grow close to her, so at least she can be close to people by serving them. She wants to put her skills to use, she wants to find a place where she fits, where she can be more herself, but she isn’t sure what that looks like or how to find it. She’s still searching, and learning many things on the way.

And Brienne is still very young. We can see her confidence growing and her worldview challenged and she is beginning to see the realities of herself and of the world around her through various trials by fire. Misogyny makes her feel incomplete, but we know the things she trusts about herself while simultaneously seeing the way she constantly doubts others. How she can't never express all of herself without constant judgment or mockery.

I feel like yes, the fact Brienne doesn't reject all traditional femininity is really important to her themes, but by extension, it's as important that shedoes reject some of those traditional expressions of femininity. What she is truly rejecting is imposition, not femininity. What she truly needs to embrace is freedom, not masculinity. She's making her own vows, breaking her own promises, going through her own mistakes. She is learning the hard way. Agency in a world of limited choices is one of Brienne's main themes too. There are moral issues that go deep within her story as well as examinations of the effects of war and the struggle to find authenticity and connection in a community that refuses to acknowledge yours, a community drenched in pretense and lost in performance.

And I think it’s easy to get too caught up in her wanting to be a girlfriend or a mother or wearing a dress that we bypass the whole conversation around why that matters at all. I feel like Brienne's success isn't going to come from her fully embracing all her feminine traits or fully accepting all her masculine traits but from being able, down the line, to be exactly who she is.

#give this girl the CHOICE!!#and not one like 'noose or sword'#or 'feminity or masculinity'#brienne of tarth #asoiaf meta

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