Representing Women in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Politics of Presence (Part 1)

Released in 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is an RPG (i.e. role-playing game) whose impact on the video-gaming world cannot be understated. In it, you play as a custom character in a fictive Scandi world who discovers they are “dragonborn,” one who speaks the tongue of dragons and is fated to slay them and absorb their souls.

When you compound Skyrim’s legacy with its massive playerbase, expansive mod capabilities, and capacious open-world format, you get an endlessly mediated game that defies oversimplification. However, this has not prevented analysis of the game’s gender politics, with online threads dating back to its release puzzling over Skyrim’s depiction of women. “Are women in [Skyrim] portrayed in a good light?” asks a GameFAQs user in 2012, to which another user answers, “Women in this game are just as dirty, violent, and nasty as the men.” Another user offers a similar, though relatively tempered response: 

“[I]t’s hard to say. I’m a guy[…] I find that most of the people in the game fall somewhere between ‘mediocre’ to ‘tool’, but there are about as many memorable women as men in my opinion. There are female jarls (rather like Skyrim’s dukes/duchesses), female housecarls, female mercenaries and high-ranking military women. There aren’t any instances in my own time with the game that struck me as sexist, just characters I liked and some I disliked.”¹

Though each user takes a different tack, their replies ultimately harmonize: in Skyrim, men and women are equal because they are equally represented.

This perspective, though not the only one, has been abundantly endorsed online. As in 2012, so in 2020: Aaron Hall’s blog post “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG” proclaims the game to be the “most feminist-friendly RPG [he’s] played”: “men and women in Skyrim have nearly no differing social expectations. They serve the same functions in society all up and down the hierarchical totem pole. For this reason, I think Skyrim might be the most feminist-friendly RPG I’ve played.” To back his claim, he lists the following observations about the game:

“1. Women often serve in prominent social positions

[…]

2. No sexualization

[…]

3. The main character can be a woman

[…]

4. No helpless damsels

[…]

5. There’s a goddess dedicated to women [“Granted,” Hall qualifies, “there are Nine Divines in the world of Skyrim and only three of them are goddesses”]”²

Hall may be right in asserting that Skyrim is the most “feminist-friendly RPG” that he has played. However, as with the GameFAQs users, Hall interprets Skyrim’s progressivism only in its representation of women. By “representation,” I think it fair to say that he and other forum posters mean “presence.” As one would be hard pressed to equate a literary character such as Aaron the Moor from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus with a breathing, enfleshed Black subject, one cannot collapse the presence of women on-screen into gender activism.

In her book Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (2000), Dympna Callaghan considers the (im)possibility of representing marginalized peoples on the English stage in the 1500s and 1600s. “[C]hange in representation alone,” she insists, “does not bring about political change.” Nor, she asserts elsewhere, is “representation” the same thing as “inclusion”: “presence alone cannot be equated with representation any more than representation can be equated with inclusion.”³ This assertion about early modern stagecraft resonates with the present discussion of Skyrim and its walking, talking NPCs who perform, among other identity categories, gender. 

To equate representation with something like activism is to have what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “faith in exposure,” or the belief that “mak[ing] something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction.” But what, she prods, “does a hermeneutics of […] exposure have to say to social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence?”⁴ Pointing to such examples as US Southern chain gangs, whose labor matters less than their scrutiny under the public gaze, Sedgwick easily problematizes the oversimple equation of representation, or visibility, with ethical inclusion. 

“What won’t feminists bitch about?” one Reddit user asks beneath a 2011 thread titled, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” “Women aren’t equal! Wahhhh!,’ they mime, “Women are too equal! Wahhh!”⁵ Skyrim may feature a comparable number of women and men. However, to claim in-game equality is to elide key features of its world, including the presence of sexual assault against women. I am always struck, for instance, by the flippant tone with which Sapphire, a female NPC, recounts her backstory of sexual violation:

“Oh, wait…it gets much better. How about the fact that our farm was attacked by bandits, and that they killed my entire family who didn’t even brandish a weapon against them. Here’s the best part. They took me as a prize, and violated me for a fortnight. Tossed me from bandit to bandit like…like…”⁶

Sapphire’s assault may be unspeakable, but it nevertheless shapes her as a character by facilitating her entry into the Thieves Guild, an in-game criminal faction. In other words, violence against women may not occur on screen, but it still permeates Skyrim. To sidestep this incident in favor of a “gender blind” reading of the game would be disingenuous. However, to overdetermine this narrative instance and decry utter gender inequity may be to go too far. What role does sexual assault play in determining Skyrim’s gender politics?

Although we never witness it first-hand, Skyrim’s men are not unschooled in the domination and violation of women. In a settlement called Whiterun, the first major city featured in the game’s main questline, a female NPC named Carlotta can be overheard despairing that “[l]ife’s hard enough with all these men propositioning me. But that bard is the worst.” After speaking with her, players can accept a quest to convince the bard, Mikael, to leave Carlotta alone. After urging Mikael in this regard, he stubbornly responds, “That fiery widow is mine. She just doesn’t know it yet.” While one can read Mikael’s lines as boyish and earnest, they take on a more sinister valence when considered alongside Sapphire’s account of gang rape. 

While celebrating a victory over his enemy, the Empire, the leader of the insurgent Stormcloaks, Ulfric, likewise demonstrates his familiarity with the logic of rape: “Now that the Empire has been driven from the Reach we can put a stop to the raping of her silver mines. That silver belongs in Skyrim.” “Rape,” in this instance, metaphorizes the extraction of natural resources as sexual assault, casting the Earth (i.e. “silver mines”) as a feminine victim of the Reach’s forced entry. Ulfric’s use of the word “rape” also signifies the theft of property, implying the existence of a gendered hierarchy where Hall (quoted above) otherwise sees none. “Rape” belies Ulfric’s belief that he is the capable patriarch charged with protecting the chastity of Skyrim’s vulnerable, feminine body. Skyrim’s silver belongs to him, so his extraction does not bear a rapine quality. The Reach, he reasons, does not own Skyrim, and their extraction is therefore a veritable act of assault. His metaphor thus bespeaks the unspoken: men and women are not equal in Skyrim.

“One thing I never understood,” begins the title of a Reddit thread, “‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” In their post, the author explains their confusion:

Olfina Gray-Mane, who lives in Whiterun, always says this to me every time I pass her. If you’re a male, she’ll say “What’s the matter? Can’t stand the sight of a strong Nord woman?” But why? Women have the same opportunities as men: there are several business owners right there in Whiterun alone, there are women in the prestigious Companions faction including the highly respected Aela the Huntress, and there are even female Jarls. Ahlam, Nazeem’s wife, says something similar: “Men are all alike, from Skyrim to Hammerfell. They care only for war and politics, and treat their women like cattle.” Again, that doesn’t make any sense seeing as how there are many women throughout Tamriel that are very much respected and even several examples of a man and a woman working together (Jarl Idrod Ravencrone and her husband and Steward Aslfur come to mind). These are the only two women that seem to complain about something that doesn’t appear to exist. Anyone else find this strange?⁷

Beneath the veneer of Skyrim’s equal representation of men and women lie the gender inequalities of a patriarchal (i.e. male-dominated) system. Stephanie Weaver catalogues such inequalities in a 2017 blog post called “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1”: bandits, when snuck upon, can be overheard bemoaning the suspected infidelity of women and illegitimacy of children, a serial killer in Windhelm exclusively targets women, and a necromancer named Arondil kidnaps and sexually enslaves local women who once rejected him, to list a few examples.⁸ Perhaps, as the cultural consensus about Game of Thrones goes, Skyrim’s developers sought to generate a brutal and, thus, realistic world by referring back to strains of gender inequity that players would find familiar. Regardless, it is not only inadequate to source political progressivism in mere representation, but Skyrimdoes show why Olfina Gray-Mane insists that being a woman in Skyrim is not easy.

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1.  u/Charybdis, “Are women in this game portrayed in a good light?,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” GameFAQs, March 8, 2012. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/62183595. ↩︎
2. Aaron N. Hall, “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG,” The Aaron N. Hall Blog (blog), May 11, 2020, https://www.aaronnhall.com/2020/05/11/skyrim-the-feminist-friendly-rpg/. ↩︎
3. Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2000), 18, 9. ↩︎
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Reading in Fiction (Duke University Press, 1997), 139-40. ↩︎
5. u/Rachel_gmrgrl, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” r/gaming, Reddit, November 12, 2011, https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mag6e/women_in_skyrim_a_feminist_perspective/. Emphasis added. ↩︎
6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda Softworks, 2013. ↩︎
7. u/LaPhantomess, “One thing I never understood: ‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” r/skyrim, Reddit, October 1, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/3n6skq/one_thing_i_never_understood_its_not_easy_being_a/ ↩︎
8.  Stephanie Weaver, “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1,” Speculative Rhetoric (blog), July 29, 2017, https://speculativerhetoric.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/skyrim-the-unequal-application-of-bigotry-pt-1/. ↩︎