Gender requirement for TheWomanWearingTheQueenlyMask

Taking it from the Trope Description Improvement Drive...

At its core, The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask is about a ruler/leader who is forced to wear a mask of unfeeling competence — sometimes resorting to harsh measures — in order to run the country (or faction, or whatever) as smoothly as possible and achieve what is necessary in the face of fiece opposition from their own people/subordinates. However, to justify why the trope is Always Female, the page goes on to rambly tangents (and unnecessarily gushy, in my opinion) about the importance of gender dynamics and how the internalized conflict between the woman's natural vurnerability and their position of power adds to the appeal of the character archetype, which the page describes as "alluringly lonely".

I have to ask, is it really necessary for this page to be defined as an Always Female trope? None of the examples really allude to the gender dynamics so extensively defined by the description, and focuses more on the character's need to project a tough exterior, because that's what's genereally expected of a leader, who are meant to be seen as the pillar of their society.

Isn't the non-gendered general type The Chains of Commanding?

I think they're somewhat different- The Chains of Commanding is about the angst that the person in a position of authority feels because of their authority/responsibilities, while The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask is about how a woman in authority presents herself as cold and unfeeling even though she's really not. The Chains of Commanding doesn't require the character to pretend to be colder than they really are, and The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask isn't necessarily angsting because of her authority/responsibly.

Edited by Orbiting on Oct 29th 2021 at 4:21:03 AM

Yeah, The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask is about the leader's attitude (i.e. projected aloofness), while The Chains of Commanding is more about the burden of the responsibility of being a leader. If anything, I find the former more similar to Being Personal Isn't Professional (e.g. suppressing individuality and personal desires and feelings in order to achieve what's needed for the greater good), although Being Personal Isn't Professional is not limited to leaddership roles.

Bumping for more discussion. I want to rewrite the description to make it more gender-neutral, but someone said that it's a TRS issue, and I'd like to know if downplaying the gender requirement of this trope is actually a big enough of a definition change to do without a TRS.

I think you're looking at TRS, at best, if you want to downplay or remove the gender-specific requirements. The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask is about women being forced to downplay or suppress anything that people regard as "feminine" just to be seen as a legitimate authority, due to the perception that a woman cannot be a natural leader.

To give you some real-life examples, Margaret Thatcher was the UK's first female prime minister. She was forced to do things like learn how to speak in a deeper voice to be taken seriously as a leader (something she apparently did without any professional coaching, but did on the advice of the men around her). Biographies about her have repeatedly talked about how she was forced to be more of a man than the men just to be taken seriously in her role — once she obtained the "Iron Lady" reputation (which occurred very early in her leadership), it became the definition for any "strong-willed" female political leader — despite it describing traits that were often considered unremarkable in male political leaders.

Hillary Clinton has often talked about how the perceptions of women as leaders forced her to suppress her emotions as much as possible because any display of an emotional reaction would have her labelled a "hysterical woman" when the exact same emotional response in a man was acceptable. The result? She was criticised as coming across as unfeeling and aloof instead.

The trope is limited to royalty, but that's the situation it's capturing — the discrepancy between what's expected of a woman and what she's forced to do to "un-woman" herself in order to be accepted as a leader — does exist in real life; the trope just adds the consequence that the effort of doing all this damages the royal's emotional wellbeing in the process (that can happen in real life, but the trope makes it a necessary requirement for the trope to be in play).

I do think it's a legitimate trope, but I think the trope description could stand to be cleaned up to present its intention in a better way. That, however, would be a rewrite to better explain why it's Always Female, rather than making it gender-neutral.

The only way I could see the trope working for men would be if there was a matriarchal society, but a man unexpectedly ascends to the throne and finds himself having to "de-man" himself in order to capture the attributes expected from queens in order to be seen as a legitimate ruler, and that this takes a toll on his emotional wellbeing. The point of the trope is how a character's emotional wellbeing suffers because they're forced to divest themselves of their society's gender norms just to be taken seriously as a monarch because their gender norms are incompatible with their society's expectations of the monarch. It's because most societies are patriarchal, and therefore define a leader's role in terms of masculine traits, that is the reason why this trope is about women. As a result, you'd have to create a gender-reversed society for the trope to be able to apply to men.

Edited to add: I suppose that there is the option that a man who is considered too effeminate by his society's standards is forced to sacrifice his emotional wellbeing because he has to "man up" to be taken seriously as a monarch. That would be a gender inversion of the current trope, and probably would start overlapping with some homophobia tropes in the process.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Nov 2nd 2021 at 10:20:42 AM

Isn't that definition already covered by Iron Lady though? The description of the latter states that female leaders must be tough and masculine (or present the appearance of being tough and masculine) "to get past other people's masculine-tinted expectations of leadership", and what you describe in the above post is redundant to that.

Not to mention, virtually none of the current on-page examples even allude to the gender roles and its perceived incompatibility with a leadership role. Most of them just boil down to "character overcompensates to be taken seriously as a leader" (and the reasons why they might not be taken seriously have nothing to do with gender) or "being a leader is hard because you often have to do things you dislike for the greater good" (including being tied into an Arranged Marriage).

Edited by Adept on Nov 2nd 2021 at 8:28:05 PM

Iron Lady seems to be about a fictional portrayal of a woman as actually stoic and tough as a character. The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask is about the expectation and necessity to squeeze into an Iron Lady role even when the character does not naturally fit into it.

There's also She Is the King examples who have to be Iron Ladies.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Nov 2nd 2021 at 10:08:28 AM

I mean, the description of Iron Lady already alludes to the possibility that the woman in question isn't actually as tough and harsh as she presents herself as, and an Iron Lady whose masculine facade takes a toll on her emotional well-being can just be listed as a Deconstructed example of the trope rather than a separate one.

Maybe fictions aren't just as nuanced when it comes to exploring the relationship between gender roles and positions of power, and because of that I really don't see why The Woman Wearing The Queenly Mask can't be broadened into a less gender-specific trope of "a person who doesn't have the necessary qualifications/qualities as a leader is forced into a leadership role".