Gender Essentialism in Amazon's The Rings of Power (season one)
Or: is it accurate to Tolkien's mythos to strictly conform to the gender binary? Not really.
Now that the dust around Rings of Power season one has settled a bit, I will be posting a few opinion and analysis pieces about the show so far. Hopefully, everyone has had enough time to relax now, and a mere mention of the show won’t immediately summon legions of both aggressive defenders and aggressive detractors. It’s okay to have a middling opinion of a television show, friends. That said, while generally speaking my opinion is quite middling, both blog posts that I have lined up on the subject highlight my two major critiques. Please don’t take away from these that I hated everything the show was, that is just incorrect. If it were not for the finale, I probably would have given season one an 8/10. Following the finale, I give it a 5/10 (to be explained in a future blog post).
The following was presented at Leeds International Medieval Congress 2023 for a round table on the show as part of the Tolkien studies track. For most of the images, I’ve just thrown in my slides because it’s easier than trying to format many image examples. Enjoy!
What we’re going to look at here is how gender essentialism is very present in Rings of Power, but isn’t actually representative of Tolkien’s work, which has far more gender diversity than it appears on the surface. But let’s begin by defining our terms.
Gender essentialism is the idea that gendered traits are innate in the body, and therefore one’s sex and gender are fixed. This is a thoroughly flawed concept for many reasons. It neglects one of the major tenets of feminism as put by Simone de Beauvoir, that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman”. It ignores trans people, it ignores intersex people, and it is mostly a product of Victorian misogyny and pseudoscience.
Now on the surface, it might look like Tolkien is thoroughly a gender essentialist. According to his letters, he believed that women behave one way and men behave another (Letter 43 is a good place to start for this). Even his description of the Valar in the Ainulindalë, which is sometimes used to support trans readings (as it does detach the gender of the spirit from the physical body), can be also read as describing a version of gender essentialism: that feminine traits and masculine traits are inherent to the spirit, and therefore when they choose bodies they pick one that matches their spirits. But it isn’t that simple. In terms of the Valar (and of elves as well), Tolkien distinctly separates the body (hröa) and the spirit (fëa). The gender of the spirit and the gender of the body can be different by nature of being separate, even though they usually aren’t. In 1984, Melanie Rawls wrote about what she called the Feminine Principle in Tolkien’s Legendarium, which was how Tolkien used feminine characteristics for male characters as well as female ones, and thus didn’t actually put his characters into these boxes where “women do this, men do that”. One of her great examples is Elrond, who is a healer and keeper of a safe haven, not an adventurer.
But there is another thing that Tolkien does in regards to gender. His non-human species blur the lines of assigned sex characteristics. The Valar are one example, and the dwarves are another (who I will get to in just a moment).
Rings of Power has done a great and necessary job in terms of racial diversity, and I don’t want to undersell that (though valid arguments have been made that they haven’t done nearly enough). Yet, I do think it has used this racial diversity as a smokescreen for the lack of gender and sexuality diversity. In the eyes of Amazon, just one kind of diversity is good enough. In fact, Rings of Power adds gender essentialism where it doesn’t exist in the legendarium, and purposefully hard-lines what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman through a conservative 21st-century lens.
I’m only going to give a few examples here, but there are more than just these. I may come back to this blog post once I’ve done a rewatch and just tack onto the end a more comprehensive list of examples, but consider this a grouping of the most visually obvious.
The first thing I want to observe is the use of something widely referred to as “Boob Armor” or “Boob-plate armor”. It is the shaping of armor to have breast curves, which is solely aesthetic and actually weakens the strength of the armor. It’s about form, not function, and has a long history in fantasy illustration. Were this kind of armor to be present for all female characters in armor, I would write it off as ignorance in simply following a tradition and not knowing any better. But the fact that Galadriel has proper armour, while the Númenorian soldiers, the background dwarves, and the cultists have boob armour tells me that it was an intentional choice. They do know better, but they want to distinguish between the feminine and the masculine through costume, and in doing so differentiate Galadriel as a superior warrior (read: more masculine).
Dwarf beards have been a major contentious issue with this show. Canonically speaking, do dwarf women have beards and should they have beards in this show? This question has become something of a joke in the community, used as a laughable dismissal of people critiquing the “canonicity” of Rings of Power. I find turning this into a humorous moment really distasteful, as it throws the large number of women (both cis and trans) who have facial hair under the bus. Tolkien went back and forth on whether he thought dwarf women had beards or not, so the question of canon is something of a rhetorical trap. The important thing here is that not only did he consider it, but he repeatedly considered it. What Tolkien did with the dwarves by considering that dwarf women and dwarf men are nearly indistinguishable is that he blurred the gender essentialist boundaries. In dwarf culture, we don’t know what defines a man or a woman because it isn’t the physical traits that we humans use to define the difference. This is an incredible freedom to speculate, and Dr. Sara Brown continues to do work on that subject.
But the showrunners of Rings of Power didn’t want to speculate. They want something safe and something easy.
As you can see from both the right hand of my slide and the image above, it is entirely possible to represent dwarf women with beards and still have them visually coded as women. It isn’t an excuse to say “Well, we needed to be able to tell the difference visually”. It can be done. What Rings of Power did by not having a single dwarf woman with a beard is insert gender essentialism where it wasn’t in Tolkien’s source text. They have chosen to take a bit of radical lore, one which has canon legitimacy and is widely accepted, and backtrack. In 2023, when trans issues are front page news, and when we are currently sliding towards genocide, to backtrack on this radical bit of widely accepted lore is a political act. They were confident in being political in terms of racial diversity. They are capable of being confident here, and they chose not to. Even if we don’t consider trans, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people, so many cisgender women have facial hair. This is radical representation that we are losing because the showrunners want to insert what makes a woman a woman in their eyes. This is a deeply conservative gender essentialist idea of feminine beauty that isn’t even true in human beings.
The elves are a bit more complicated. Tolkien’s descriptions of the elves tend towards being ephemeral, beautiful, and elegant, and some of the male elves do have long hair (Celeborn for example), though all of them definitively having long hair is Peter Jackson thing. Galadriel is also described as having quite masculine traits for an elf (for a very comprehensive breakdown of Galadriel’s queerness, see the Queer Lodgings podcast episode on the subject, though the masculine descriptors are evident enough simply by reading Fellowship of the Ring and “History of Galadriel and Celeborn” in The Unfinished Tales). The elves represent the opposite side of the gender spectrum to the dwarves. Where all the dwarves seem to lean masculine, all the elves seem to lean feminine for the most part, but they have gender diversity within that communal femininity. Círdan is the only elf to be described with facial hair. For the most part, Rings of Power does keep to elven elegance, but they inserted something a bit weird.
Aside from Galadriel, most of the female elves in any shot have their hair covered and many are veiled. This is especially present in Lindon, as this seems to be less prevalent in Eregion (for the limited amount of time spent in Eregion and not within Celebrimbor’s study). This wouldn’t be an issue if occurred only a handful of times (the decorative hair net in the bottom image on the left for example is quite beautiful and wouldn’t be concerning at all on its own) or if it was evenly split. Yet none of the male elves seem to cover their hair this way, and it is almost constant. This is a very specific mode of representation that draws from Abrahamic tradition, the idea that women must cover their hair. In some cases always, and in some cases only in holy spaces.
I think if we compare hair across different cultures and locations as represented in Rings of Power, we can see what they’re doing here.
In Lindon, which is for all intents and purposes the elvenhome closest to Valinor in this Rings of Power setting, most of the women have their hair covered. One female soldier aside from Galadriel and one or two in the background do not.
In Eregion, where the female elves presented are smiths and workers, their hair is not covered.
In both locations, and across elvendom in Rings of Power, most men have short hair, and all women have long hair.
On Numenor, on the other hand, there seems to be quite a lot of hair diversity. Men have long hair and short hair, and there is even a woman with short hair. I am of course making an assumption that she’s a woman but I feel I’m right in doing so given that this show has so little gender diversity.
Then we have the cultists, two of whom have their hair covered, and one who has extremely short hair.
What I think they’re trying to signal with hair length and whether or not hair is covered is holiness. The elves of Lindon, whom the showrunners deem closest to godliness, have an almost monastic approach to hair, which is only covered by women. This monastic aesthetic in hair is also visible in the lack of sideburns, which are shaven off entirely. The elves of Eregion are craftsmen and workers so are further from godliness, and don’t need to cover their hair. Humans, Dwarves, and Harfoots, in being further from godliness, have a more naturalistic approach to hair, but the only clearly short-haired woman is on Númenor. This is speculation, but I think this diversity in hair length on Númenor, where it’s not really present anywhere else, is a judgment. Númenor is a civilization in decadent decline. It feels, to me, to be a pointed choice that a civilization in decadent decline has more gender presentation variance, whereas a civilization deemed closest to godliness has much stricter gender essentialist division.
The cultists serve as a clear example of both of these things. Their hair is covered because they are religious zealots, and when we do see their hair, it’s extremely short. Long hair seems to be associated with godliness, but only for women as the male elves mostly have short hair with a few exceptions. Meanwhile, the only notable male elf with long hair is a character we’re meant to dislike, draped in gold with a Roman-style laurel on his head, so take that as you will.
You can also see this division based on morality in how much skin is shown. Elves are, for the most part, completely covered. Disa, a dwarf, has a long slit up her skirt, revealing her leg. She and Durin are the only characters allowed to kiss up close on screen, with the other kisses either being interrupted or immediately cutting to a wide shot. It has also been implied that her morals can be dubious. The only other characters who have an exposed leg like this….are the cultists.
The problem with all of this in 2023 is that it hardlines a very conservative gender essentialism where women must look a certain way and modesty is deemed the most beautiful and most holy mode of expression. The problem with this in terms of Tolkien is that, under the guise of “understanding” Tolkien’s faith, it misinterprets the text. The elves are not angels. The elves are not Monks or Nuns. The elves are much closer to the fae, and they cherish beauty above all things, not modesty. Beauty, and especially natural beauty, is not modest. It is sublime. It finds beauty in the natural form as is, not the natural form constrained and covered. One would never describe the natural motifs of William Morris as modest. In “On Fairy Stories”, Tolkien writes that the real folk of Faerie “put on the pride and beauty that we would fain to wear ourselves”. While Tolkien’s elves did evolve into something greater than just fae, their origins are in this otherworldly, tricksy and sometimes dangerous love of the beautiful natural world, and the making of living, breathing art. Their enchantment is an enactment of that art-making that is overwhelming to mere human sensibility.
In a sense, in having elves for the most part be modest and covered, I think Rings of Power draws more from an imagined medievalism than Middle-earth’s elves actually do. What’s more though, it applies not a Catholic aesthetic of holy beauty, but a Protestant one, or a Mormon one.
I believe that Tolkien’s elves, in their love of beauty and in their otherworldly quality, draw from the aesthetic sensibility of Catholicism, which is quite maximalist. The more decorated, the more splendid, the more sublime, the closer to the feeling of the sublime and the feeling of holiness. Protestantism, which influenced the Mormon aesthetic, cherishes minimalism. It strips back the gilding, it finds holiness in modesty, not in excess. But that isn’t Tolkienian. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of aesthetic vision, with a political agenda held by evangelical conservatism in 2023, that puts women in their place and erases any gender diversity.