At the Edge of Night: Who Owns a Woman’s Truth?

May 14, 2013 By 16 Comments
One of Chloe Sagal's games, Homesick.

UPDATE: I'm leaving this article up for the time being but everyone concerned with the issues discussed here should read this roundtable between Chloe and Allistair at Gamers Against Bigotry. This post at Destructoid also gives some further updates and details about the case, and Allistair Pinsof himself has replied to this article; you can read his response and my reply here. Needless to say, I'm overjoyed Chloe Sagal is well enough to discuss what happened and I look forward to her joining our community very soon. I still welcome you with open arms, sis. By now word has spread like a nauseating shockwave through the various channels and tributaries of the Internet: independent game developer Chloe Sagal “defrauded” online contributors to her IndieGogo crowdfunding campaign for what she’d called a “lifesaving surgery;” in the wake of the internet-mob-justice bacchanal that followed, Chloe made an apparent suicide attempt on a Twitch.tv stream. She is, as of this writing … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming, Life Story Stuff Tagged With: , , , ,

“It’s Just a Game”—The Discursive Construction of the Virtual

June 17, 2012 By 3 Comments
Visual metaphors! M.C. Esher! Giant ants! This picture has it all! (Giant ants-- at least I like to pretend they're huge-- walking around a wire-mesh mobius strip).

It’s been quite a while since I updated here. I’ve been exceedingly busy working on a research project in my sociology department and with some of my other commitments as well as a few personal problems I had to overcome. But, I'm back, and I thought that in the wake of Anita Sarkeesian’s struggle with a cavalcade of trolls over her proposed webseries it’s worth digging up a recent piece of writing I submitted as a final paper in one of my classes (Gender and Geography). This paper sought to chart out the geographic dimensions of cyberspace, particularly gamer subculture, through the lens of “the space of exception”. I’ve excerpted a part of the paper that I think is quite relevant to what had just transpired with Feminist Frequency. In a section entitled “It’s Just a Game” I describe how the “unreal” nature often imputed to gaming space gives licence to abuse that would be intolerable outside of it. This “unreality,” I argue, is on the flip-side of a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming Tagged With: , , , , ,

Immoral Women: Why We Need More of Them

March 4, 2012 By 2 Comments
"Do not brand me a tyrant!" What I also find interesting about some of these characters is that they are portrayed as being older-- lines of middle age are visible on Meredith's face, for example, and Kreia is older still. It's a positive image for older women, to say the very least.

This article is due to be published on Border House this coming Tuesday. In case its raging nerdular nerdence doesn't give it away, it's about video games specifically. Enjoy! One of the most irksome things I hear when I make arguments for ‘good/positive portrayals’ of characters from traditionally marginalised backgrounds is that my interlocutors immediately assume I’m calling for portrayals of moral paragons. They seem to think I’m saying “if you write a gay male character, he must be the most righteous dude ever.” In a word, no. That’s what today’s article is about, particularly with regards to women characters. The reality of the situation is that the portrayal of women as pure, stainless alabaster icons of virtue is a huge problem that arises from cultural stereotypes of women. The notion that women are inherently more virtuous, kinder, and so on is part of the limiting and fetishising pedestalisation that serves to fence us off from being thought of … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming Tagged With: , ,

I’m Being So Sincere Right Now: Gaming as Hyperreality

September 2, 2011 By 2 Comments
Sisters of Janus: Therese and Jeanette Voerman from Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Both blonde haired, pallid women, one wearing a dark grey business suit and black rimmed glasses, the other wearing a stylised schoolgirl's outfit, bra and thong visible, and a blood red choker. She also wears deep makeup.

When I play certain video games I get the strange feeling of wandering through the weird and lurid landscape of a Dali painting; beholding the familiar, albeit distorted in the strangest of ways. One might expect this. After all, video games are not supposed to be realistic by default. They operate on their own internal logic, their worlds hewn out of something called ‘game design needs’ rather than say billions of years of geology and thousands of years of culture and history, for instance. But I came to realise it was something beyond that point which I could comfortably suspend my disbelief and immerse. What jarred me out of, almost consistently, was the fact that many games have had the pretension of being representations of the real. A artificially warped landscape is a good and interesting thing so long as one does not purport that it is, in fact, akin to a photograph. Rated M for Misconception Whenever one hears the word “gritty” or “grimdark” appended to … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming Tagged With: , , , , ,

In Faith, I do not Know Thee by Thy Name

August 15, 2011 By 3 Comments
Shodan

In my recent article for The Border House I took on a number of the arguments made by a few starry eyed technophiles in favour of ending the practise of online anonymity. This is a significant issue for me that, in its many facets, presents me with the ultimate intersectional landscape on which to grow my ideas about interpersonal politics. In other words, it is very easy to talk about sex, race, power, class, and a range of issues surrounding both individual and group behaviour (group psychology and sociology), identity, and just plain old techno-geekery. It touches on a myriad of issues that are important to me. What follows is a refinement of what I wrote for The Border House and an expansion of it. I.- Setting Information Free(?) It is very much worth mentioning that the central idea behind the anti-anonymity advocate’s vision is the firm belief that the death of anonymity will allow information to flow more freely. The reality, however, is that the end of anonymity means a … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

State of the Corn: Not-Quite-a-Weekend Update

March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

So, a brief sidebar for all my usual readers whom I love and adore; yours truly has participated in Bitch Magazine's blog carnival celebrating all manner of feminist click and anti-click. I wrote an article about the meaning of online gaming to me as a trans woman and as a feminist and posted it on The Border House. You may find it in all its glory here. The essence of the article is that I learned a tremendous deal about what it meant to be a woman in contemporary society- vivifying the second half of Susan Stryker's famous (to me) definition of womanhood: "A woman is one who says she is and then does what woman means." I learned, in ways both empowering and painful, what being a woman meant. What's more, I would come to terms with who I was, and most important of all, roleplaying showed me that there was courage and strength in womanhood. It prepared me for the fight that would explode forth in all its fury when I finally decided to come out. The article was meant to convey some … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming, Management Stuff

State of the ‘Corn: Where I’ve Been!

November 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

For anyone who might be interested, I've written a piece for The Border House about the portrayal of women's power and sexuality in games. Hop on over if you want to read! I am also, as always, busy with work, reading, and being an international woman of mystery but more will be up here on The Nuclear Unicorn soon enough. And by soon I mean Soon(TM). … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Gaming

The Laboratory of Dreams: Theory from an RPG Sourcebook

October 24, 2010 By 5 Comments
eclipsephase_cover_phs

When we’re children we’re often taught that great ideas are the product of great minds; blessed ideas that spring forth from the creator’s cranium like Athena from Zeus, fully formed and miraculous. But the truth is that ideas of the most compelling sort have no one source, and can come from the most intriguing of places assembled from seemingly dissociated bits and pieces. Recently in my writing about theory I’ve tried to convince you to look at it as something that grows from daily life and is itself a kind of practise as a result. What this way of looking at things enables you to do is see ‘theory’ as being more ubiquitous than it may first seem when you, say, look at a college textbook. Enter Eclipse Phase, a pen and paper RPG set several hundred years in the future with a post-apocalyptic setting. The action, however, need not take place on the despoiled Earth. Our Solar System is home to countless colonies, some independent, some confederated, that express the gamut … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming Tagged With: , , ,

Daughter of Zero Queens: Roleplaying as Resistance

August 28, 2010 By 6 Comments
Liera- in purple with the staff- surrounded by her friends. Yes, even the dragon.

  Picture it: a World of Warcraft RPPvP server, 2006. A good friend of mine takes up a wager with a female friend of his to test a “theory”- at least it was nothing but a theory to him, at that time. She had often sparred with him about the idea that women were treated differently in online gaming and he was more than a little sceptical. If this were about treatment in, say, the workplace or the home environment or out in the street, this back and forth might have gone on forever. But this woman had a solution that only a game like WoW made available to her. She made a bit of a wager with my friend: roll up a female character, play her, roleplay (RP) her if you like, and don’t tell anyone you’re a man in real life. My friend agreed, being the adventurous sort and an avid RPer to boot, and went forward. To this day he still tells me how his experiences over the course of the next month completely changed how he understood the treatment of women in games like … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Feminist Theory and Criticism, Gaming, Life Story Stuff Tagged With: , , ,
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 77 other followers