Sansa as the embodiment of white femininity and white feminism
I have always felt alienated by Sansa Stark as a character. Born high-born and privileged, she epitomizes classic, traditional, feudalist white womanhood. In spite of how clever and hardened she has become, she still exudes an aura of, shall we say, white female purity that prompts fans to fight over her and viciously defend her, to the point that anyone who doesn’t immediately fawn over her is despised, called vicious slurs, and hated. Any female character in the show that clashes with Sansa is also hated.
Fans of Sansa have been known to mock Arya’s gender non-conformity and even claim that preferring Arya to Sansa is a form of “anti-femininity”; they have been known to call Daenerys a foreign whore/a colonizer/an “invader”, which as an immigrant I find amusing because being called an “invader” is one of the more mundane xenophobic insults we deal with; most recently, they have even been known to defend Northern racism and xenophobia, which Sansa has tacitly endorsed by showing hostility toward Daenerys and her armies, and openly questioning how to feed those armies before said armies were sacrificed for the sake of white Northerners, and some Sansa fans even made racist comments about Missandei, simply because Missandei made a gently critical comment toward Sansa in 8.03. This is how defensive people are of Sansa - if you don’t worship her, you’re branded persona non grata, a misogynist of the ages. Sansa fans, most of whom are white liberal feminists/liberal feminists in general, weaponize progressive misogyny to glorify Sansa at the expense of other female characters, and believe they are in the right for doing so (e.g. celebrating Dany or Missandei’s deaths, calling Cersei slurs, making fun of Arya’s gender norm-defiant habits). Yet if someone were to point out Sansa’s objective flaws, or the flaws in her storylines, they would be branded an irredeemable misogynist. Any analysis of Sansa’s flaws is waved away with “she’s traumatized; yet Cersei is stripped of her agency as a traumatized woman and assigned the trope of one-dimensional mad queen, while Daenerys is assigned pure villainy, rather than moral complexity, and her trauma is not allowed to be factored in.
I am a South Asian bi woman, and an immigrant. I have never been able to relate to Sansa’s story because she was born privileged and because she embodies a pure version of white womanhood that prompts people to be viciously defensive. This mirrors exactly how people are with regards to white women in real life. People will tear apart women of color for the sake of white women. Historically, men of color, especially Black men, have been beaten or killed if they so much as looked at white women “the wrong way”. White women have been able to weaponize “crocodile tears” to demonize women of color. When watching Game of Thrones, I was never very into Sansa as a character for this precise reason. Even before Season 8, even before I saw how the got/asoiaf fandom on Tumblr is, even before I knew that Sansa fans hate Daenerys, even before all of that, I was not able to like Sansa because she reminded me far too much of the vicious white women I grew up with, the ones who were beautiful and feminine and skinny and could bat their eyelashes one minute and get what they want. Sansa has gone through a lot, of course, and undeniably so, yet she is by far not the only female character who has gone through a lot; yet fandom expects that we worship her and only her, which is far too reminiscent of how I have been shoved aside or demonized for the sake of white women. Moreover, Sansa interacts entirely with only white people; it is no wonder that Daenerys, who is dubbed a foreign invader, and who interacts with many people of color, is more relatable as a character to me (and this is before even mentioning everything Daenerys does as a liberator).
I mention Sansa’s epitomization of a specific form of white femininity for a reason. Femininity is a co-construct of colonialism and patriarchy. White femininity could not be created without the concurrent rape, dehumanization, brutalization, and exclusion of women of color (including enslaved women from African nations, Indigenous women, and colonized women from Asia, Africa, and South America). I’m not going to go into more specific details about this because it requires a separate meta. In short, though, Sansa’s femininity is so alienating to me because it is not a femininity I could ever fit into. Being coercively masculinized is an experience most women of color can relate to at least somewhat, since most of us at some point or another have been excluded from white definitions of femininity and womanhood. For more reading, I highly recommend The Coloniality of Gender by Maria Lugones, especially if you don’t understand why I’m saying that femininity as we understand it is a product of both colonialism and patriarchy and what ramifications this has for women of color.
A common talking point I’ve briefly stated is that Daenerys is a colonizer/imperialist/white savior, perhaps as common as the point that she is fated to become a Mad Queen. It is expected by a small but vocal minority of this fandom that if you are a woman of color, or an “ally” to women of color, you’ll hate Daenerys and consider her to be a white feminist character. The voices of actual women of color who like Daenerys are completely erased in this scenario; in many cases, those of us who do like her are deemed ignorant, or told that we need to educate ourselves. Women of color who do like Daenerys, funnily enough, get called racist and misogynistic slurs by white Sansa fans, who are then the same fans that turn around and call Daenerys a white savior. This cliché that “hating Dany = being an ally to woc” is so popular that any time Daenerys is brought up, it is almost expected that a WHITE Sansa fan will say “she’s a white savior” or “y’alls white savior fave [….]”. It is evident that white women do not understand what white saviorism is or how it actually operates, especially when these white women act like Sansa herself isn’t white and high-born, or when they act like preferring Sansa to Daenerys is more progressive/less white feminist, or when they even go as far as claiming that preferring Dany to Sansa is “white feminism” even though, again, BOTH Sansa and Dany are white women (and GRRM only considered writing one of them as Black, and it wasn’t Sansa, my friends). Stripping fans of color of their voices and agency is not actually progressive. It’s not progressive to weaponize critical race discourse for the sake of fandom drama, or for fights between fans of two white female characters. It’s not progressive to tokenize women of color or racialized misogyny. It’s not progressive to claim that women of color who like Daenerys are white or stupid or can’t have their race card anymore or worship white people or that they should “take a 23andme” test or whatever, especially if the argument is that you should hate one white woman (Dany) only to love another (Sansa). Yet all of this is done in the name of Sansa, which again goes back to my point that her brand of white femininity is the dangerous and insidious type, the one that makes my skin crawl in trepidation.
Anyway, that I as a woman of color am expected to care more about a hyper-feminine white girl who was born privileged and grew up privileged and is overtly classist and has done nothing revolutionary for marginalized people or the smallfolk than about a white woman who, while feminine, was born in poverty and exile, and has explicitly enacted revolutionary actions against slavers, rapists, and child abusers, all in the name of going against white feminism/white saviorism, is genuinely funny to me. All this just makes me feel even more that it is Sansa who is the quintessential white liberal feminist character, NOT Daenerys. In this world, the white feminist character is not the one who gleefully burns slaveowners and child murderers and is then reviled (by both the narrative and the fans) for doing so.
The one who remains (as the queen of the autonomous kingdom of the North) is Sansa, a type of women beloved by today’s capitalism: she combines feminine softness and understanding with a good dose of intrigue, and thus fully fits the new power relations. This marginalisation of women is a key moment of the general liberal-conservative lesson of the finale: revolutions have to go wrong, they bring new tyranny, or, as Jon put it to Daenerys: “The people who follow you know that you made something impossible happen. Maybe that helps them believe that you can make other impossible things happen: build a world that’s different from the shit one they’ve always known. But if you use dragons to melt castles and burn cities, you’re no different.”
Consequently, Jon kills out of love (saving the cursed woman from herself, as the old male-chauvinist formula says) the only social agent in the series who really fought for something new, for a new world that would put an end to old injustices.
So justice prevailed – but what kind of justice? The new king is Bran: crippled, all-knowing, who wants nothing – with the evocation of the insipid wisdom that the best rulers are those who do not want power. A dismissive laughter that ensues when one of the new elite proposes a more democratic selection of the king tells it all.
And one cannot help but note that those faithful to Daenerys to the end are more diverse – her military commander is black – while the new rulers are clearly white Nordic. The radical queen who wanted more freedom for everyone irrespective of their social standing and race is eliminated, things are brought back to normal.
Why am I as a woman of color expected to love/care more about the white woman who only spends time with other white people, most of whom are high-born and are xenophobic regardless, and who is handed her Queen status on a silver nepotist platter, but revile the white woman who spends time with people of color, has freed slaves, is a queen who is chosen by those who follow her, and fights for the smallfolk, only to be reviled by the men around her? It is precisely because Sansa is the personification of upper-class, nativist, xenophobic white womanhood, and she appeases the appetites of liberal feminists but is both soft and gentle enough to not be threatening to men, the same men who call Daenerys a crazy bitch for burning slaveowners, rapists, or the abusive traitor Randyll Tarly, and celebrate her death.
Dan & David, as stupid as they are, were clever enough to realize that by granting Sansa QiTN status, they would be giving breadcrumbs to her (mostly white) liberal feminist fans who only care about her and would see Cersei dead and defanged, as well as Daenerys dead and demonized, to get this achieved if need be (which is exactly what happened). They are also rich white capitalist men who thrive off propaganda. The argument that first she came for the slavers and rapists, then she came for the innocents, is explicitly white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal propaganda, which D&D are happy to promote, because it aligns with their interests. It rings the same bells that “anti-fascists are the REAL fascists” or “BLM activists are the REAL terrorists” or “proletarian revolutionaries are all going to turn out like Stalin” because the same types of people (rich white men with neoliberal agendas) are churning out the same soundbites. And a lot of you fall for it, because as long as the precious, pure, angelic white woman, who is beautifully feminine, has the purity of a white bloodline, and can do no wrong, gets her happy yes queen ending, then we can turn a blind eye and root for Dany’s death.
Take note, of course, that all but one of the characters who gets a happy ending are white. Grey Worm is the only character of color with speaking roles and interiority left on the show; I do not count the unnamed Dornish Prince because, well, he’s unnamed, he doesn’t speak, and the Dornish don’t gain independence, despite 1) retaining independence against the Targaryens and 2) being as brutalized/fucked over by the Lannisters as the Starks were. Notably the Greyjoys, who sided with the revolutionary-turned-evil Queen, don’t get independence either. The North, belonging to the King’s Sister, does, and unquestionably so, without the consent of the people, and we are supposed to be satisfied with a happy oligarchy in which Brienne can write about a man who broke her heart and used her, and men can joke about brothels. The evil revolutionary queen dies early in the episode, some tears are shed for her, she’s called a tyrant, and then we’re done with her, and most focus on the real heroes: the Starks. Zizek points out:
…the last struggle between the Starks and Daenerys – ultimately between traditional “good” nobility (Starks) faithfully protecting their subjects from bad tyrants, and Daenerys as a new type of a strong leader, a kind of progressive bonapartist acting on behalf of the underprivileged.
We are told that the Starks ultimately earned their happy ending, even though Bran did not participate in the game of thrones at all, even though Sansa did nothing in the fight against either the Night King’s Army or against Cersei, even though Daenerys is the only one shown actually liberating marginalized people and ruthlessly holding their oppressors accountable. Dany is called a white savior for doing those things, and her mistakes in pursuing her anti-slavery agenda are held against her, and yet the same people accept nepotism and oligarchy without argument, again because they, from the beginning, accept the argument that traditional, isolationist, nordic feudalist white people are the real heroes, and anyone who defies this norm is a villain. Do we see a single scene of the Starks fighting on behalf of the serfs whose labor they profit off of? No, and yet we call Daenerys the “white supremacist” character, or the “mad” character, or the “tyrant”. This kind of propaganda is so successful in America, even among liberal feminists, because socialist revolution is synonymous with tyranny and anti-liberty in this country.
The woman who proposes breaking the wheel of rulers and freeing slaves and serfs around the world is actually turned into a villain at the very last minute. In fact, her killing of evil men is explicitly framed as evil, through Tyrion’s very speech to Jon in 8.06. She kills evil men, so of course it’s no wonder that she’s now gone mad and killed civilians. This is the same kind of warning that rich white people utter in real life; if we allow antifascists, or Black Lives Matter activists, or leftist feminists, or labor organizers to run amok, we’ll be overwhelmed by tyranny and anarchy and authoritarianism. So, instead, the woman who lived her life in privilege should be handed a royal status by her Brother the King, and we should cheer this on and accept this because she worked so hard and she went through so much and she’s so precious and clever and pure (development of her cleverness hardly being shown aside, we MUST accept that she is /the/ cleverest character on the show, because she had some snappy yes queen lines that we know to fawn over).
Daenerys has been far more threatening to the egos of male fans than Sansa has been over the eight years got has aired. It’s no wonder - Dany routinely kills evil men as Tyrion pointed out. Where we cheered on when Sansa fed Ramsay to his dogs or conspired against Petyr Baelish, we view Dany killing slaveowners, rapists, and child murderers as evil and as foreshadowing madness. This discrepancy in similar actions undertaken by two traumatized women is only possible because Sansa appeases the white liberal feminist appetite without threatening male viewers, white viewers, or capitalist norms, and because she does so with a more genteel face and a naive facade.
This is why, to me, Sansa is the ultimate white feminist character of got/asoiaf. We fall for her trap of white femininity and endorse the most egregious forms of racism and misogyny just for her sake, and we call it feminism and we call it progressive, and we sometimes even have the gall to claim it is pro women of color to do so. Yet the type of femininity and power Sansa has is exactly the kind that excludes women of color and, in real life, would necessarily feature the marginalizing, sidelining, or demonizing of women of color. That eerily xenophobic rhetoric is used against Daenerys is thus not surprising. If we aren’t too careful, according to both white liberal feminist fans of Sansa and according to white men, we’ll end up letting foreign revolutionary evil mad queens like Daenerys in our midst, and they’ll hold too many evil men accountable for their actions.
This is my analysis as a woman of color, one that is actually based on nuance and critical thinking rather than just parroting the same faux-progressive soundbites, so I sure hope so called “allies of WOC” don’t force me to like Sansa just because they want me too.
