Subverting the Gender Hierarchy: An Analysis of "God Games" Through a Feminist Lens

Publication Date

Spring 2026

Presentation Length

15 minutes

College

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences

Department

Communication Studies, Department of

Student Level

Undergraduate

Faculty Mentor

Dr. Michelle Shaw

Presentation Type

Article

Summary

Using feminist criticism, I will be analyzing the song “God Games” from the album “EPIC: The Wisdom Saga (Official Concept Album),” one of nine albums written and produced by Jorge Rivera-Herrans as part of a concept musical that retells Homer’s The Odyssey. To briefly summarize the song, it is the goddess Athena’s attempt to persuade other Classical Greek deities to allow Odysseus, the main character of EPIC, to be released from his confinement away from his home. The nature of this artifact is that there are multiple audiences (each of the gods is spoken to separately, for a total of six), as well as multiple messages, with the primary purpose of the speaker being to persuade the other gods to a specific action that each of them has reasons to not do. Although the Greek gods are traditionally shapeshifters that can change their gender presentation, Athena generally presents and is viewed as female, especially in the context of the musical. In this song, she directly attempts to persuade both men and women, often using stereotypically gendered issues as an element of her rhetorical tactics. Because of this, feminist criticism is the ideal approach for discussing this topic, as it will provide insight into how Athena’s gender presentation influences persuasion, how Athena uses her gender as power in some of her arguments, and what voices are silenced or amplified within these gender dynamics.

While I have yet to begin the in-depth analysis of this artifact, cursory observations lead me to believe that my focus will be on Athena’s relationship with the gendered power dynamics at play; there are moments where she integrates herself willingly and uses her traditionally lower position in the hierarchy as a persuasive tactic, and there are others where she pushes against the power structures in order to prevent her voice from being silenced. This idea of shifting strategically through multiple levels of this power structure is especially compelling to me, as Athena herself has always been a contradictory concept: her main domain has historically been war strategy, which the Greeks seldom would have let women participate in, let alone command. Athena is already pushing against gender hierarchies and power structures, so analyzing this artifact using feminist criticism will allow for some interesting conclusions.

While my research question may change as I discover new elements hidden in the artifact, my tentative idea is to discover how Athena can move between different levels of the gender hierarchy present with the other Ancient Greek deities. I believe this will be best analyzed by examining the way in which Athena sings (sometimes with traditionally masculine tones and sounds, sometimes with more higher, feminine notes), the actual words which Athena uses, and the rhetorical strategies she utilizes and how those work differently depending on both her gender presentation in the moment and the relationship of Athena to the specific audience in each of the sections. This question may solidify as my research progresses, but I believe this to be the most prominent aspect of the song. 

No generative artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the writing of this work. The author expressly prohibits any entity from using this work for purposes of training Al technologies to generate text, including without limitation technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as this publication. This work may not be entered into an AI program (including Chat GPT) for any reason. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative Al training and development of machine learning language models.

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