The Queer Matrix: Game of Thrones

For Pride month, I thought I’d bring back a feature I created some years back. I set it aside for a long while, but you can check out my past matrices on Broadway and popular culture in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the New Millennium as well as my original post on what inspired me to create it.

So what is the Queer Matrix? It’s an analysis of popular culture along the dimensions of queer sensibility and queer content.

I define queer sensibility as a way of looking at the world based on the shared experience of queerness. Some common characteristics are an outsider point-of-view, an unapologetic belief that queer is beautiful, and the subversion of heterocentric, ciscentric, and gender-normative narratives. To say that a queer sensibility exists does not mean that every queer person in the universe has the same attitudes and perspectives. But it does avow that queerness creates distinct cultural constructs and aesthetics.

Am I being too academic? I’ll try not to turn this into a college thesis project.

Queer content is easier to explain. It is queer representations in our culture, whether literature, art, film, music or television. Queer content is explicit. It is gay sex on the page, and lesbian romance in the lyrics,  and gender-bending in the visual arts.

The Queer Matrix endeavors to illustrate my belief that not all queer content reflects a queer sensibility. Furthermore, some non-queer content can be said to reflect a queer sensibility. I call the antithesis to queer sensibility: non-queer sensibility, which is the mainstream, heterocentric, cis-centric, gender-conforming point-of-view. One example of taking queer content and making it non-queer is the plethora of comedies that play around with gay situations for laughs (see: The Wayan Brothers franchise).

I am a huge fan of Game of Thrones and doing a queer matrix on the show had been bouncing around my head for a while. Before we get to that, here are some disclaimers to reduce the potential flaming I will receive. Both the topic of Game of Thrones and the topic of queer sensibility have a tendency to evoke passionate opinions.

Disclaimer #1: My queer matrix is adapted from New York Magazine’s Approval Matrix, and in the same vein: “a deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where” on the queerness hierarchy.

Disclaimer #2: I cobble together the queer matrix by working in Word and converting the file to a jpg. Hopefully the result is passable.

Disclaimer #3: I haven’t read the books, so the matrix is entirely related to the HBO adaptation.

Disclaimer #4: If you want to pay me to do a queer matrix on your favorite topic, I won’t take money but I will happily accept your appreciation in the form of buying one of my books.