Gender & Sexuality in ASOIAF - Two hour convention panel video

[The Dragon Demands]

I ran the Game of Thrones programming track at my local con last week and recorded all of it.

I had a double-sized 2 hour panel on "Gender and Sexuality in Game of Thrones" - offline I hold a master's degree in medieval history and it's based on my graduate-level course readings on gender & sexuality in the Middle Ages. 

The panel is about the books - as there really isn't much difference on this point between books and TV series.  Here's the whole thing:
 

I earlier wrote up a "Gender and Sexuality" article on GoTWiki and A Wiki of Ice and Fire, I explain the same points there. 

I only discuss the TV show on three, really two, brief points:

1 - The TV show occasionally remarked in passing that Lancel having sex with Cersei is "unnatural", ignoring the fact that first cousin marriage isn't considered incest in Westeros (and like, Joanna is still in "the TV continuity").  Minor point. 

2 - To their credit, the TV series has depicted homosexual characters *more prominently* than in the novels (i.e. Renly/Loras is in both, but the TV show actually gave them more scenes which were "off-screen" in the novels.  This isn't really a "difference").  -- also some brief words on when I asked GRRM about making TV-Yara bisexual (pointing out that the real life Vikings actually didn't conceptually recognize female homosexual behaviors, so that actually kind of fits with them on a societal level - we never knew what ironborn attitudes towards that were, in contrast with say, the Faith of the Seven, which in the books overtly doesn't like female homosexuality).  Not really a "contradiction" there.

3 - ....third thing the TV show does differently is "social status of women", but that's such a big topic I split it off into the next panel after this one, and won't be covered here.

The audience was very nice and I'm surprised they were "fascinated" by some concepts I pointed out; in the last half hour I lump in some spillover material from the "history of marriage" panel;  I.e. I go into some detail explaining how the definition of what constituted incest changed over time (sometimes including 3rd cousin, other times not) and thus the definition of marriage changed over time -- I thought that would be the most boring part because it's very technical but they quite enjoyed it. 

Overall, my biggest surprises from the audience:

1 - There's a point in the video when I ask all the TV-only fans if the show made it clear that they have female priests - septas are co-equal to septons, Unella is a Most Devout and basically a cardinal.  Which should have massive ripple effects in their society, social status of women and so forth.  NONE of them realized this; I mean they picked it up right away when I told them, but they were frustrated that they'd been watching for six years and the TV show failed to make that explicitly clear.  Really, when I explained the whole female priests thing, it was mind-blowing to them.

2 - They were quite confused by the religion of Norvos - but aren't we all, eh?.  Seriously, I meant to spend like 20 seconds on it, ended up spending a whole 3 minutes because they just kept asking questions. 

[SFDanny]

I don't normally read posts that deal with the show, but I did want to bump this post up for those who do. Perhaps it should be in the show sections of the forum? It's an important topic that deserves more discussion.