#it's just both fire and blood and her messianic image as this mhysa are equally chaining her

[khaleesirin]

Can your expand on your argument that Dany represents borderlands identity? I read Anzaldua before and your claim is bordering controversial.

The thing is, it only sounds controversial if we only consider Daenerys Targaryen a white person and saddle her own identity formation with white history and guilt, even when the idea of being white doesn’t make sense within the context of her own story line. Whiteness (and all it entails) doesn’t mean anything to Dany at all because she doesn’t have the consciousness of a white person; she never articulated her identity on the position of whiteness. While there may be something to be said with George RR Martin and the way he parallels ASOIAF with real life history, it doesn’t mean we can reduce Dany’s story with white saviorism or white feminism (can we move past this talking point already?) when he spends so much time constructing the world she revolves in, painstakingly writing her own experiences.

I brought up Anzaldua’s Borderlands because it rests on the assumption that there is no such thing as an identity that comes naturally; rather, our identities are articulated based on our positionality (i.e. subjective history, the culture we actually interact with). These subjective factors construct the sense of who we are. Specific to her own dilemma, if you are from a family of mixed-race,  or if you live in a place you call “home” on a land that was forcibly taken from its native inhabitants, or if you are positioned in these different places (i.e. being at once Mexican, Indian, and White) because you are a product of these intersections of culture and history, how do you deal with the contradictions attached to it? Which culture are you going to follow? Which gender norm are you going to assume? Which part of who you are do you have to oppress to privilege one part of your culture, the part of history that was thrust upon you? Where do you belong?

Like Anzaldua, the main problem of Dany’s identity crisis is the duality of who she is. While I don’t think Dany is at that point where she actively recreates her sense of self outside her dual image to finally have her borderlands consciousness (although her long title may be that consciousness), her story does parallel Anzaldua’s own problem with the question “where ‘the home’ is?” exactly because she had to always let go a part of her to belong somewhere. That by constantly having to choose which side of her she should privilege, she ends up feeling not belonging anywhere.

Dany suffers from socio-cultural ambiguity.  She was told over and over by Viserys that Westeros is “our land” but as she admitted to herself, the places he spoke of, “they were just words to her” (AGOT, Dany I). Westeros is an imaginary place for her: a dream, a place that will never be, and a place she can always be.

But being Daenerys Targaryen means she had to silent the other her, the one who constantly seeks for comfort, the one who dreams for a more passive, comfortable, peaceful life of a woman. Dany, who never really wanted to have the responsibility of a queen.

If I were not the blood of the dragon, she thought wistfully, this could be my home. She was khaleesi, she had a strong man and a swift horse, handmaids to serve her, warriors to keep her safe, an honored place in the dosh khaleen awaiting her when she grew old … and in her womb grew a son who would one day bestride the world. That should be enough for any woman … but not for the dragon. With Viserys gone, Daenerys was the last, the very last. She was the seed of kings and conquerors, and so too the child inside her. She must not forget.  (AGOT, Dany VI)

and this:

“If they were so unseaworthy, they could not have crossed the sea from Qarth,” Ser Barristan pointed out, “but Your Grace was wise to insist upon inspection. I will take Admiral Groleo to the galleys at first light with his captains and two score of his sailors. We can crawl over every inch of those ships.

“It was good counsel. “Yes, make it so.” Westeros. Home. But if she left, what would happen to her city? Meereen was never your city, her brother’s voice seemed to whisper. Your cities are across the sea. Your Seven Kingdoms, where your enemies await you. You were born to serve them blood and fire.

….

How beautiful, the queen tried to tell herself, but inside her was some foolish little girl who could not help but look about for Daario. If he loved you, he would come and carry you off at swordpoint, as Rhaegar carried off his northern girl, the girl in her insisted, but the queen knew that was folly.

….

Memories walked with her. Clouds seen from above. Horses small as ants thundering through the grass. A silver moon, almost close enough to touch. Rivers running bright and blue below, glimmering in the sun. Will I ever see such sights again? On Drogon’s back she felt whole. Up in the sky the woes of this world could not touch her. How could she abandon that?

It was time, though. A girl might spend her life at play, but she was a woman grown, a queen, a wife, a mother to thousands. Her children had need of her. Drogon had bent before the whip, and so must she. She had to don her crown again and return to her ebon bench and the arms of her noble husband.

(Dany, ADWD)

The schism between Dany and Daenerys Targaryen, between what she really feels and what she ought to feel, between what she wants and what she must do, between where she really is and where she should be. While Daenerys Targaryen must always orient herself to Westeros, while the Queen must always attend to her people, Dany is simply lost. At one point she thought Vaes Dothrak would be her home, at another she thought Meereen is her city. In both cases in didn’t turn out to be where she can be; it both cases she just doesn’t fit in.

In terms of gender role, what is she really internalizing? It’s interesting that what she truly wants, as Dany the young girl, from the bottom of her heart, and this is something she still longs for even in ADWD when she fully committed herself to the role of a Queen, is to simply have a life with a husband she loves, tending after her children, and be a–excuse my language–home mom; she wants to be a girl from those fairytales who gets to be surrounded by things of beauty, to be saved by the thing of beauty. It awfully sounds like internalized sexism don’t you think? But is it? If you are in her position, when all your life the people around you have been purposely, consistently, persistently, telling you that you are a dragon, that you should act like a dragon, you’re the last scion of House Targaryen, you must take back what once was us, you must be the perpetual Regal Queen (which if we take a step back, are all masculine roles), she seems to be also, and this is more pronounced later on, internalizing masculinity.

For me, in some level, this is really what white feminism isn’t all about. This particular situation echoes what has been brought up over and over and over by many scholars of feminism and intersectionality– what we may define as empowering, what we may describe as finally exercising women’s own-agency, really depends on their situation. It depends on the context. No kind of feminism (which is a revolutionary articulation) happens out of vacuum, it’s always a reaction to something. What that something is will change how we will react to it. While white feminism is tone-deaf when it comes to the particular situation of a person, and very hegemonic with what lifestyle we should be having, here is Dany’s storyline turning gender expectation upside-down. 

So a food for thought here: when she got pushed back in Meereen by silencing a part of her, by making her voice a little bit lower, compromising on everything she really wanted to destroy,  is it really empowering for Dany to choose fire and blood, to believe that she should have completely chosen House Targaryen all along, to be the queen as was expected from her? Or is this chaining her further, and at the end of ADWD when she finally thought to herself she really is a dragon, that’s also her succumbing to a form of defeat, that she can’t escape her role?  That no one will really save her? As someone who constantly chooses to save other people, a big reason for that is her desire to be saved as well.  

So thus for her, the Dany, without the roaring sound of her last name, based on her actual experiences, the fairytale with those traditional sexist roles may be something that will finally bring back what she had lost: herself. And maybe, that is what’s truly empowering for her.