@lhazar, my response is going to be even longer. And I mean, very long, so strap up.
This might sound even harsher, since this is addressing your own feelings:
but to justify Rhaenyra asking for more and more children to die to fill the void of Luke and Visenya…. Like, how can you say this is still a good and moral character anymore? This is your queen? She’s not even asking for Aemond in this scenario. She wants Aegon dead. Yknow, the now-disabled father of the little boy who was killed in her name? It wasn’t about asking for Luke’s death to be avenged by cleanly asking for his killer punished. It was about power and solidifying her insecure reign by killing her male rivals. Also once Aegon is gone, there’s also a zero percent chance that she’d stop there, and go after Aemond next. Pick whatever side you want anon but you need to understand that Rhaenyra isn’t gunning for justice asking for more blood spilled, but for the extermination of those who stand in her way. It’s cold and calculating and entirely just to secure the throne, but it’s what she chooses to say to Alicent to hurt her the most, and to torture her into making an impossible choice when she comes to her and asks to stop the war. The same way Rhaenyra tied to do earlier!
‘A son for a son’ has absolutely nothing to do with justice anymore. It’s by no means about equal losses. And I think you forget where ‘an eye for an eye’ means and what the rest of it is is. It makes the world blind. It’s how everyone loses when all slights can be justified with violence. And at this point, vengeance has blinded Rhaenyra. And the rest of the world, including the rest of her family, are absolutely going to be paying for it as things spiral out of control from here.
Alicent asked of Viserys & Rhaenyra an impossible "choice" back in 1x07: eye for an eye. Explicitly, those were her words. She says these words in lieu of what she and her stans/green stans/fake neutrals have already time and time again have said was the "normal" Westerosi practice of eye-for-an-eye retribution. When it was Alicent, it was justified and "understandable" and even obligatory of Rhaenyra to submit to; but when Rhaenyr, who says that she "must" kill off Aegon and Aemond to secure herself AFTER THEY ALREADY SHOWED THEMSELVES TO WANT TO ELIMINATE AND HAVE USURPED HER, WHEN SHE IS WAS THE ACTUAL PROVOKED PARTY YET AGAIN, WHEN IT WAS AEMOND WHO KILLED LUKE AND AEGON WHO CONTINUED TO ACT AS IF HE WERE THE RIGHTEOUS KING...Rhaenyra is the one who is "cold" and "calculating"?
I nor anon said Rhaenyra is perfectly "justified" in wanting more kids to die...bc Aegon and Aemond are not "kids" they are both fully grown adults, one who killed an actual child. Plus, show Rhaenyra did not ask for an actual child's death in return...her book self we don't really know, but we also don't ever hear her say she wanted Jaehaerys dead or any of Helaena's kids dead. The same sister she calls her "sweet sister", btw. Explicitly.
I said/implied that it made more sense. As much as green stans and fake neutrals said Alicent was "justified"--eye for and eye--for taking one of R's kids' eyes for Aemond's when she actually wasn't bc Aemond was not letting up on beating the kids after they stopped fighting him.
Anon said "TECHNICALLY"--bc they are going by the same eye-for-an-eye ideology that the greens/Alicent were the actual ones to evoke first to get their way both show and book.
Anon was just following through on that logic the greens rode on. And even if they didn't, Aemond killed Luke in a diplomatic run; Aegon usurped a woman who, no, was not "inevitably" get usurped by someone else, bc guess what no one else in the realm could really stand against the slew of dragons Rhaenyra had even if they tried PLUS we already know, book wise and despite what the show erased, that Rhaenyra always had more supporters and those who favored her rule over Aegon bc they wanted to keep the practice of heir designation viable in ther customs to protect any heirs they may choose AND/OR valued oaths.
So for me/anon, it makes more sense and was less worthy of the same sort of criticism I have for 1x07 Alicent--to feel the way she felt bc Alicent's own actions led to her son getting his eye taken by pitting him against the woman she herself said she was jealous of from the very beginning. Unprovoked. Lucerys was chased for a long time in the show; in the bk, Aemond took pride in killing him even if you argued that maybe there was an "accident" there. He will always be responsible for Lucerys' death bc he had no business chasing him down with a far bigger dragon.
Your words feels like a rewrite of fandom history. I even already wrote about this way back, how greens tans cannot argue Alicent was justified with eye-for-an-eye just as you are saying to me now--AS THOSE GREENS STANS DID while also actually saying Alicent was Rhaenyra's victim when she never was. Ever. And how it has always been the other way around for 10 YEARS in the show, even longer in the book/orig story.
The other thing is that even with me saying it made more "sense", I still don't like how the show made Rhaenyra go all "son for a son" bc
that was always Daemon. Bk!Rhaenyra doesn't even think or order her siblings' deaths/executions until much later into the Dance!!!!
It's far too late and misplaced for her to feel this way or feel any sort of righteousness abt killing the greens for her kids when the show also made her not want to war for those kids' deaths/murders....so late into 2x07 when it should have been from the jump.
So now people are putting words in my/others' mouthes.
Aside from that, Aegon of his own free will decided to go to a battle he had no business going to, both book and show. He was reckless, but no one made him go. This is a weird assignment of blame onto Rhaenyra, when HE decided to usurp her--bk and show--and was very willing to kill or imprison her in the book. And yes, by his eagerness to stay king, as by 2x07, when he talks to Larys, he officially wants to usurp or take Rhaenyra's crown. Plus, why should I feel any type of way about a rapist who cannot rape anymore? Should I now feel bad or cruel for when a rapist or a pedo gets his dick chopped off? You're quite obviously trying to use disability as a way into erasing Aegon's culpability and mark him as a total innocent victim. Please stop and just block me.
Pick whatever side you want anon but you need to understand that Rhaenyra isn’t gunning for justice asking for more blood spilled, but for the extermination of those who stand in her way. It’s cold and calculating and entirely just to secure the throne, but it’s what she chooses to say to Alicent to hurt her the most, and to torture her into making an impossible choice when she comes to her and asks to stop the war. The same way Rhaenyra tied to do earlier!
Okay, so what sort of "payment" or punishment do you think Rhaneyra should get from the man who killed not only an actual teen-child, but a teen-child who was at Storm's end under the traditional political protection emissaries have...during a time when show/bk Rhaenyra was trying to "peacefully" intimidate the greens into submission with a show of support from the lords? What Aemond did was a declaration for war, was a break of military rules that, yes, have and did exist in real medieval societies. Yes, there were rules of war.
What is the punishment of a traitor in this world, hmm? Esp murderous traitors? What do usurped rulers do with those who have directly usurped them?
Rhaenyra is right to point out that Alicent cannot expect to save her sons for what she already induced one to do and the other to encourage or at least set up to do AND get that "peace" she says she wants so she and Helaena could run away into the sunset. It is a fantasy, she already helped the usurpation to occur. If she never did, Rhaenyra--bk and show--would have no pressure or reason to kill off her brothers. And over again, she didn't even order their deaths in the bk until way later!
No, Rhaenyra doesn't just say that to hurt Alicent to "get back" at her--she's being as "real" as the writers chose to make her. This is what happens to traitors and usurpers or just those who are in competition for a seat of power--they get eliminated or exiled or stripped of every way to retaliate and "come back".
And yes, Rhaenyra did go to her to try to stop the war...but Alicent said something along the lines of "it's already happened, nothing we can do"....but NOW Alicent wants to make a plan bc NOW she feels like bad?! We're on Alicent's time, now? Even the achievement of taking KL is made into Alicent "allowed", unlike in the book where Daemon tricks Aemond and he/Rhaenyra both go to take it while bk!Alicent flounders to protect it in Aemond's absence.
Basically, it seems more like when Alicent feels there needs to be a turn in people's actions, then they should follow.
That's all you seem to feel and convey with all this in mind. As if Alicent--the onw who made this war possible in the first place--is the moral compass of this show! Maybe the writers have throughly convinced you, "lhazar" (I suspect you are one of those who defend Mirri Maz to your last breath....ironic), but that doesn't make them correct.
Finally, I don't even like or approve of these Rhaenyra-Alicent's meetings for peace bc:
from the jump these meetings endangered both women
both women could/should have imprisoned the other and get ahead in the war and actually bring about "peace" faster or have a higher chance of doing so that way
the absurd impressions of distance
But I feel compelled anyway to defend the motivations of bk!Rhaenyra and some of show!Rhaenyra's bc you have twisted them into something evil just as the writers both consciously and unconsciously decided to d with F&B as a whole.
A miscarriage is when the body expunges fetus is without "labor"...it doesn't result in a stillborn nor labor. Rhaenyra had to be in labor for HOURS. Visenya was a stillborn and was anticipated by her family, esp Rhaenyra, with all the accoutrments of having an infant in the home. So it wasn't a miscarriage it was stress-induced stillbirth that came from HOURS of labor.
And I think that it's a mistake to see Rhaenyra's inducement as not or not as induced from the shock, or see that shock as not truly so terrible as to induce labor from an ignorance of labor, pregnancy, and how consequential emotions can be on a pregnancy...bc it clearly was. We know grief can lead people towards suicide and even chronic illnesses...why can't news of death coupled with the news of one already having lost their position do something similar to the pregnant, the person who has that added physical-emotional vulnerability?
It's not even that I'm denying that Rhaenyra says they murdered her kid, it's that people--incl you--seem to take that as she thought they deliberately went out of their way and purposefully wanted to kill her kids by usurping her. No, she says that bc she knows that without the usurpation they DIDN'T HAVE TO DO, she would have had a living child. Which is true.
Three: "infanticide" means murder of an infant, not a child-child. Jaehaerys (Helaena's child) was a child-child. Visenya was going to be an infant. Jaehaerys' death nor either Aegon nor Aemond (fully grown adults both book and show, even if defined as "adult" the Westerosi way, is is 16 and above) could ever be ruled as an "infanticide". It specifically means "killing of a child within a year of its birth". An "infant" is a child under 2 years old. And an infant is a child who was born and survived outside the womb but they have to be outside the womb alive to count as an "infant". Otherwise they are a stillborn fetus. Miscarriages=/=stillborn.
The show depicts her as stillborn, ripped out of Rhaenyra by her own hands after significant bleeding, and premature. That’s not something a fetus in this age can survive. But it’s not like team Green is physically reaching into Rhaenyra and killing her baby—not like blood and cheese breaking into the keep to murder and decapitate a little six year boy. Also, sorry, this topic is so heavy and everyone has different opinions, but a stillborn fetus is in no way the same as a child who’s been alive for years and is just becoming a person. It’s just not.
The show is not a valuable or valid source to describe how woman monolithically or majorly act, feel, etc, even in a medieval environment. In multiple ways. They gave that up once they had Rhaenyra & Alicent lose their ambition and self concern as well as erasing several woman and girls who were directly in the battles or at least commanded/organized/initiated them from afar.
HotD!Rhaenyra is explained to us as just wanting Visenya to leave her so she can go and address the greens' betrayal and it is "just" bc apart from her crying at the funeral, we see no other indication of her orig anger for the death of her child or even her MORE GROWN child Luke who died by a even more grown offspring of her enemy (Alicent) who plans to usurp her since he was a child at the same enemy's instigation...
This isn't nuanced objectivity; bc it is a clear rewrite against the bkRhaenyra partly inducing the war for Visenya bc the show writers don't understand that bit of nuance. It's centering the same motivation to "be like a man" that itself is and will always be problematic in the show as well as removing culpability from the greens' slow and steady years-long planning to remove Rhaenyra from her station for their own greed.
Even with them not intending on killing her Visenya, their hatred for her and her kids--bk and show, yes they hated them--was enough to induce the circumstances of Visenya's death.
But even in the show, Rhaenyra:
rips the child from her herself, as you say, BECAUSE we hear how "this should not be happening" bc "Her term is far from complete."--her child is too early to survive, so she thinks she might as well force it out with her own hands...which is not book canon as thus far, but whatever, we're talking abt the show's mishandling here.
goes into labor once she hears about Viserys death AND her usurpation, just as in the book. We see the shock in Emma's face, we can put together that the labor that followed was induced by that news. Plus, what i already said abt people saying that her labors are too early and it "shouldn't be happening". No the greens did not attempt to force her to induce that labor, but their betrayal was never necessary for their own survival nor was it "justifiable" and as I already showed, there is absolutely no indication IN-THE TEXT of either show or book for you or most people to think that Rhaenyra's labors were inevitably going to happen regardless of whether the usurpation would have happened or not.
This is a Twitter user who describes their own experience with the loss of a child-to-be-born:
Book!Rhaenyra clearly states that part of why she will war with the greens is that her daughter would have never been forced out if they had done what they should have and not betray her. So it is very obvious that she--and not you, bc who asked?--genuinely valued this child/fetus as her own child with its own personhood, arrested or not.
Yes a fetus is not quite the same as an infant and a child one raises, but obviously, a wanted pregnancy is a different ballgame to an unwanted pregnancy bc the parent(s) have all the expectations and vision for a child they will raise and care for and love.
So you trying to make a fetus=/=child erases this particular nuance that also pretends as if Rhaenyra didn't love her daughter or saw her as worthy enough to fight for. It even, by thus, tries to undermine her feelings and any woman who feels this way as "irrational" when wars/skirmishes have really been fought for even less in/close to Westeros. Petty disputes of land and declarations of "disrespect" b/t men--think the Marches and the marcher lords versus the Dornish.
The other thing is that I never even said that the greens went out and intentionally induced Rhaenyra's labor or that was even in any of their thoughts (though Alicent is rumored [admittedly] to have said something along the lines of "mayhaps she may die in childbirth", and that is even worse bc that's a wish of death to mother and child. But even this is not a plan or packaged intent of harm by use of usurpation). You're teetering towards strawmanning.
Once again, killing a 6 yr old is not "infanticide". Because Jaehaerys was not an infant. It's child murder, definitely. Not infanticide.
Which I didn't get into above, above I will here. Infanticide is a particular historical and social phenomenon of infants being killed usually by their relatives with very particular reasons. Parents kill them bc scarcity of resources. Rape, too. These are the biggest reasons why these occur and yes people have killed older kids for the same things or sold them off; and sometimes to avoid public censure (rape or out-of-wedlock) or bc they don't have access to abortificents, they wait till birth to kill the infant. Why wait to avoid public censure if you just going to show yourself to have had a kid anyway? Because infants and children have always been the ones to die often so you could easily mask an infanticide that way.
This is the account of Visenya's stillbirth & the labor (The Blacks and the Greens):
There is no indication that if Rhaenyra hadn't heard what she did or had at least not been usurped, Visenya definitely would have been stillborn. All available evidence leads back to the news of Viserys' death and her usurpation. She had many successful and seemingly uncomplicated births before. All her kids survived. But the one where one doesn't happens to be when Rhaenyra is thrust into dealing with death and betrayal? Sure.
As for Visenya's appearance, you will notice that the text you mention explicitly states "Mushroom tells us" and "Or so Mushroom describes her". This is the same guy who said he was invited to bed with Harwin and Rhaenyra and was there in bed w/Daemon & younger Rhaenyra when he "taught" her how to sleep with men so she can entice Criston Cole.
Mushroom is always meant to be taken with a careful grain of salt. though like Septon Eustace he was in close proximity to the royals, like Eustace, Mushroom also was prone to have his biases and twists of truths (Rhaenyra bleeding on the throne being told to be a curse by Eustace, or him saying Mysaria manipulated Rhaenyra with diabolical-magical language and making Rhaenyra say such similar things to explain why she went after Nettles).
Yes he doesn't lie all the time and sometimes he even brings up good reasons for why some things occur, like with the KLers feelings about the royals after Rhaenyra's death. But he still more than often exaggerrates NOR does he have all the information he says that he has and he likes to insert himself into events in ways that immediately puts the event in some layer of doubt and "mystery".
This is one of those times we take with with a grain. He says that he was not only there in the room or near it when Rhaenyra was laboring, Rhaenyra/Daemon entrusted him to take the stillborn child to her burning himself, and this is how he supposedly gets to find out what V looked like.
It is believable/plausible that Rhaenyra was screaming "monster" for how ferociously painful and body-horror such events can be--thus "monstrous"--and for how conflicted she herself felt with how she wanted to go after the greens, how she was thrust into absorbing the news of her father's death, and then having to deal with the pain and fear of the induced early labors all at the same time--again, such effect of an amalgamation of contradictory and potent emotions and pressures happening all at once like a "monster"--but she loved that child and wanted her. It's just a paradox of life, the pain of labor and care for the child...but here it's made into a tragedy from how botched and how clearly botched it was by the tragedies that Rhaenyra learned.
However, Mushroom often likes to exaggerates to make himself more important to the events that went on and to feel/make as if he had more of a possession over Rhaenyra esp through his sexual descriptions and self inserts (even in situations where no sex but anything to do with intimacy or reproduction and genitals are involved...he often mentions his own supposedly large penis size). He often says things that he could not have known existed or occurred bc he himself was not present in the location and/or timing to have witnesses said phenomenon. Like when he says there are eggs under Winterfell.
Yes, we may someday have Gerardys's notes proving Visenya has that draconic look and the hole in her heart. We may have confirmation from the midwife and her helpers. Perhaps she only had the hole in the heart. However, the ONLY named source for Visenya's appearance is explicitly Mushroom: "Or so Mushroom describes her".
Thus, in a strangely similar sort of way where I describe Mirri Maz Duur's descriptions of Rhaego and her motivations below, Mushroom's own descriptions (though not malicious-intended or seeking to trick Rhaenyra but his listeners), there is a critical layer of subterfuge the narrator tells us in both that similarly throws Mushroom's account into high-doubt at least in Visenya's appearance alone.
B) Now, one may try to point out how Rhaego was born with scales and affirm Visenya's having been "always" nonviable like Rhaego. Thing is, Rhaego was not unviable. He was killed. Like Visenya, he was wanted and anticipated by both parents, so yes, he was "killed"/"murdered" and not "removed" as you would describe for a fetus that was intentionally aborted by said parent(s)'s decision.
Stillborn-Rhaego (Dany's child) who was "born" with scales and a heart-hole and whatnot...after Mirri Maz Durr killed him in the womb. MAGICALLY ("AGoT--Dany IX"):
Though Rhaenyra's child was not magically killed by an outsider, I point out how Visenya was a healthy child BEFORE the induced labor as Dany's child was. How they share that particular thing even if Dany's's unique for how maliciously intentional the stillbirth was.
We don't EXPLICITLY get to see Rhaego in the womb but by how Mirri finally admits that she murdered Rhaego after trying to decieve Dany many times and being crptic, it's pretty clear that theres a very high chance and thus likelihood that Rhaego did not look like how she described in the womb when he was definitely alive. The hole in his heart also likely wasn't there even when we now that infants can be active in the womb while having holes in their hearts.
Mirri's intent and her attempts to lie to Dany before finally admitting her act, how she uses her god and metaphorical language to basically say that Rhaego was never alive despite having been active in the womb and then saying that he'll never burn another town like Drogo did to hers to cause such miseries are all indicators of her justifying inducing a stillbirth as part of her overall revenge. To her, Rhaego should never have lived, thus she felt she was "cleaning out" a monstrosity who, lo and behold, came out looking what she would take as a monstrosity with his animal-human compound features as Visenya had, supposedly. All that comes from a back and forth of manipulating reality/truth from the malicious passion Mirri had. She was determined to "gaslight" Dany, and it's very possible she still wanted to mess her mind up after having been found out.
Thus, while it is certain that Mirri killed Rhaego, it is a little more uncertain whether or not she was also lying about Rhaego's appearance having been always there in the womb, if she even knows how it turned out the way it did with his appearance, etc. Who knows, the dragon-like appearance could be like a metaphorical-turned-reality inside-out situation bc Valyrian-descents may have hybrid dragon-human blood and Mirri's magic made Rhaegao manifest as that with or without her explicit desire. Point is we don't have that confirmation.
Since we know that Rhaego was absolutely killed in utero and Dany was forced to birth a stillborn, we absolutely know he would have very likely purple almond-eyed grown into the man Dany envisioned later if he had been left alone. They may be very different women, but the Dance likens back to the tale of the Amethyst Empress and Dany is often paralleled and in-textually linked to the sort of metaphorical "resurrection" of the Amethyst Empress against the Long Night. Rhaenyra and Dany are also both female Queen regnants; Rhaenyra's death/the loss of the dragons causes a "wound" in the magical and social fabrics of the universe (sexism kills and disturbs harmony, yada yada it's been talked abt before) and Dany both succeeds where she couldn't AND will be the remedy against the Long Night with the restoration of the dragons the Targs lost in the Dance when they denied Rhaenyra while being a female ruler.
Like Dany, Rhaenyra seeks revenge for the death of her daughter, as it happened in lieu of the news of her father dying AND the usurpation back to back (again the circumstances and motivation not quite the same, but there is a layering of motivation that links birth and power-for-self and womanhood for both that again connects them and draws thematic parallels: Rhaenyra seeks revenge for loss of long-held position due to sexism, Dany was desperate to both keep those she loved as well as assure that she gets protection from her master-husband). Thus, we can say that Rhaego would have lived and grown and very likely (Rhaenyra has never had a miscarriage or stillbirth that we know of before) Visenya's stillbirth would likely never have happened if it weren't for that usurpation.
C) There was also Alysanne's loss of Aegon, her and Jaehaerys' first ever child who even would have been Daenerys' older brother. Alysanne blames the loss on the septa-Maindenpool attack (Birth, Death, and Betrayal under J1):
Alysanne specifically states that it wasn't that Aegon was induced by a physical attack but that he wasn't allowed to grow into his healthier time to be born bc she was prevented from being "healed" by the "holy" waters of the pool. So here there is more reason to believe that this Targ birth was a regular premature birth that resulted in the infant's death. Except that with the timing described b/t the attack, Jonquil's appointment as Alysanne's guard, Alyssa Velaryon's pregnancy announcement as well as her labors many months after Aegon's birth and death, it reads very much like this premature birth was possibly induced by the stress of this attack. Bc of the timing b/t all the events I describe.
I am aware of Visenya and Rhaenys having only one child each despite their having been married to Aegon I for years. How there is a theory of Visenya birthing Maegor through magic, and how both this and the "weird" "late" pregnancies are sometimes fan-theorized as either Aegon having had infertility issues or it being that and/or the Valyrian blood magic stuff. However, Targs, dragonlords, Valyrians all also have plenty of evidence of having "normal" patterns of birth and children-counts as other houses: Valaena Velaryon & Aerion had 3 kids, the Conquerors. Pre-conquest, the Targs had a more or less alright children count even without the info of whether or not they had multiple instances of stillbirths, miscarriages, etc. that just went unrecorded or lost in time:
I am aware of some fans' theories about it being possible that some Targ babies come out looking draconic bc of Valyrian blood magic making it so that dragonlords and dragons have magically similar blood from earlier magical "genetic engineering" to bond humans and dragons. That maybe these fetuses/children were nonviable bc of some "error" along their gestation. I happen to think these are great theories and if they happen to be true, it still wouldn't negate the high likelihood that both Rhaenyra and Dany's children would have survived if they had been left alone.
So this, I think, is a clear example of how people think HotD is giving us nuance and a "better" story when really they contradict themselves many times to give us a male-gaze atrocity that undermines much of what the orig story and several details are and have been trying to tell its readers or at least convey if not didactically "teach". That in fact, in order to get that claim of "nuance", the show just really supplants the interesting challenges to how we understand medieval vs modern vs "general" women conceptualize/realize OR "should" or "could" realize tc. their motherhood/children/pregnancies/womanhoods under a feudal vs modern patriarchal context with this enduring brand of feminism that has tried, since the 70s, I think to wrest devalue motherhood or cut it off entirely from pregnancy to avoid the very real patriarchal attempt to make motherhood the only value of women/girls that was adopted from the Victorian formula of the perfect mother-woman.
To really, objectify womanhood through motherhood in both capitalist and feudal systems albeit differently, which is really how I think we should be understanding what patriarchy tries to do. It's similar to how they have made "women-are-naturally-or-have-to-be-peaceful-guides-of-naturally-violent-men" "feminist".
SKIP IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ UNTIL YOU SEE THE DOTS AGAIN
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"Hating Motherhood" -- Judith Levine, Boston Review
For Firestone the mother-child tie was a chain-gang shackle: “The heart of woman’s oppression is her childbearing and childrearing roles.” Maternal fury is inevitable, she claimed, but this fury can be a source of revolutionary zeal. She explained: “The mother who wants to kill her child for what she has had to sacrifice for it (a common desire) learns to love that same child only when she understands that it is as helpless, as oppressed as she is, and by the same oppressor: then her hatred is directed outward, and ‘motherlove’ is born.”
Duke University Black feminist scholar Jennifer C. Nash mentions this whiteness in a 2018 review essay called “The Political Life of Black Motherhood.” The field of maternal studies, launched by the 1976 publication of Adrienne Rich’s seminal Of Woman Born, was “fundamentally shaped by the intellectual and political labor of black feminists,” Nash writes. She cites hooks, Dorothy Roberts, author of the massively influential Killing the Black Body (1997), sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, literary critic Hortense Spillers, and essayist-poet Audre Lorde. Yet maternal memoirs, which also proliferated after Rich’s book, are overwhelmingly white. And not only white, they also tend toward the demonic (a term Nash doesn’t use). The genre, she says, “roots itself in mapping white maternal ambivalence, in treating motherhood as a space that takes—perhaps even steals—from women.”
How could this bondage be broken? End Nature! In vitro fertilization, “test tube babies,” and “even parthenogenesis—virgin birth—could be developed very soon,” Firestone predicted. Yes, reprotech, like warcraft, could be deployed to enforce patriarchal power. But the feminist revolution would seize the weapons and turn them on the oppressor. Compared with Friedan’s reformist white paper, The Dialectic of Sex is a cyborg’s “Bread and Roses,” singing in the death of every kind of labor. “The double curse that man should till the soil by the sweat of his brow and that woman should bear in pain and travail,” proclaimed Firestone, “would be lifted through technology to make humane living for the first time a possibility.”
But the gravest failing of The Feminine Mystique was its erasure of the people bell hooks called, in 1984, “the silent majority”—the Black, brown, and poor women “most victimized by sexist oppression [and] powerless to change their condition in life.” Presuming to describe the universal condition of Woman, Friedan’s “‘problem that has no name’ . . . actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women,” who longed for fulfilling careers. But who, hooks asked, would mind the house and children when these women were liberated? Friedan’s solution to “the problem” often boiled down to “get a maid”—or, more decorously, a “cleaning woman.” A third of women were already in the workforce, hooks noted. How fulfilled were the babysitters, factory workers, or prostitutes?
Like hooks, Collins links these women’s problems to whiteness. In Black Feminist Thought (1990), Collins argues that white assumptions about motherhood—the nuclear, private family household, the mother as sole caregiver economically dependent on a man—have historically been alien to African American women. With roots in African tribal cultures and the wrenched-apart families of slavery, as well as the exigencies of ongoing poverty, a collective approach to raising children is common in African American communities.
Nash agrees that maternal ambivalence is not the exclusive province of white people. She asks why Black feminist scholars “steadfastly refuse to document the violence of motherhood apart from the threat of state violence.” She is not interested in supplanting one dominant image with another but rather, wishes for complexity. “Is there space for maternal unhappiness in the black feminist theoretical maternal archive, space for accounts of motherhood that find mothering profoundly unradical, perhaps even tedious, exhausting, or upsetting?” Where are the childless-by-choice, the careerist, the just-going-about-her-business Black mom? Portraying the Black mother as the apotheotic revolutionary not only eclipses a vast range of everyday experience, says Nash, it also “shores up a singular notion of radical black female subjectivity: motherhood.”
Nash explores another “now-dominant,” more flattering though equally flattening, picture of Black motherhood. Here it is “a site of spiritual and psychic renewal” and a revolutionary, transgressive practice, “always upending prevailing heterosexist, patriarchal, antiblack, and misogynistic norms.” In The Atlantic, Leah Wright Rigueur opens a piece with a scene of her laughing uproariously at the birth of her third child—a Madonna of Black Joy. “Celebratory joy felt particularly appropriate for the occasion given the reality of Black mothers’ experiences in America,” she writes. Even white cultural feminists of the 1970s plucked from Blackness to draw the blueprints of their matriarchal utopias. They looked, for instance, to the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler, in whose futures the populations are brown and the mothers, while fierce and ornery (and sometimes male), are world-shapers.
They [reforms of social policy and behavior] will not solve the real problems of motherhood, which, as the demon texts plainly show, simply adapt to the times. Like capitalism, motherhood will always find ways to screw mothers.
The only solution is to abolish mothers.
That, in essence, is Shulamith Firestone’s vision in The Dialectic of Sex. It is also Sophie Lewis’s in Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family (2019). Like Firestone, Lewis is uninterested in reform. She is a utopian. She wants to break not just the inexorable tie between mothers and children but the links between mothers and gestation, gestation and family, family and capitalism, and capitalism and human life. “Let’s prefigure a way of manufacturing one another noncompetitively,” Lewis writes. “Let’s hold one another hospitably, explode notions of hereditary parentage, and multiply real, loving solidarities. Let us build a care commune based on comradeship, a world sustained by kith and kind more than by kin. Where pregnancy is concerned, let every pregnancy be for everyone. Let us overthrow, in short, the ‘family.’”
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And the point I'm making right now is that your own pts remind me too much of this strange attempt to erase the mother, the woman's own desire for a child and go through a pregnancy and even to be able value the fetus-child as a "real" child for the sake of "freeing" women collectively from the "shackling" obligation of motherhood to define themselves patriarchy induces is itself prone towards an self objectification...which Rhaenyra does not do! Which is why this feels so wrong to me.
The show just tries to or ignorantly twists the events before and during the Dance that already have a chock full of such into some sort of "bastardization" of its original intent to fit a weird 70s-80s unnuanced fantasy of reobjectifying motherhood.
Another example of how this show has had a detrimental effect on how people perceive not only fictional women and their motivations and patterns of thought within patriarchal contexts but also real women.
