Telling the warrior woman’s story: gender identity as a mode of storytelling in HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011-2019)

ABSTRACT

Joseph Campbell’s (1949) hero’s journey has historically been heavily criticised for its misogyny and rejection of female-centred heroic narratives, creating an exclusionary universalism that narrows the scope of what constitutes heroic in stories and narratives told in various mediums. However, that exclusionary universalism, while an important element of Campbell’s own mode of storytelling, reflects on the temporal gulf between the era in which it was written and the contemporary cultural moment. The current cultural moment embraces the possibility that the hero can be non-normative, thus emphasising the need to challenge the relevance of Campbell’s monomyth. In this article, I make the case for a more inclusive approach to the hero’s journey through the lens of gender identity as a mode of storytelling. I expand the conceptual framework of the warrior woman archetype to argue that gender is a constitutive consideration of heroic narratives and apply the theory in practice to the medium of television through the example of Game of Thrones’s (2011-2019) Brienne of Tarth (Gwendoline Christie). This case study illustrates how gender identity provides a toolbox for storytellers to expand the possibilities for non-normative heroic figures and facilitate an understanding of heroic narratives through alternative perspectives.

KEYWORDS:

• The hero’s journey
• storytelling
• television
• gender identity
• Game of Thrones

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louise Coopey

Louise Coopey is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Film & Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on reading representation in complex television, exploring how identity manifests within narrative and character development arcs through her concept of layered complexity. She has contributed to several edited volumes, including a chapter for the Epic/Everyday (2023) volume of the Manchester University Press’s Moments of Television series and, most recently, a chapter focusing on the televisual representation of sex workers in Game of Thrones (2011-2019) for Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).