This video is an adaptation of a keynote delivered at the 2017 Critical Game Studies Symposium at UC Irvine in 2017.
Video Transcript (by slide)
[1] Are we there yet? The politics and practice of intersectional feminist game studies
[2] Or… What would a game studies talk look like if I didn’t cite any hetero white cismen OR work from after 2006. Because when I say intersectional feminist game studies I also think part of the path forward is developing better inter-generational critical game studies.
[3] And when I use 2006 as the cut off it is not (wholly) arbitrary. There are three books from 2005 and 2006 that I want to talk about, particularly because two of them are so rarely cited. In fact, in addition to those previous rules I have endeavored to focus my citations on scholars who I rarely see mentioned in recent game studies work. I can’t include everyone of course, but it is at least a partial response to Kishonna Gray’s call to
[4] Cite her work!
And these rules I’ve imposed on myself are because in a decade or so of going to game studies conferences—which makes me seem older than I am and so many of my field mentors have been at this twice as long
[5] I feel tired of repetition. I have seen the same debates, fights, and moral panics play out over and over again. I have had the same conversations with random strangers in bus stations, at train stations, on airplanes, and at parties who happen to ask what I do so often I have
[6] learned to consciously stop my eyes from rolling.
No, I don’t think games are going to make
[7] your children serial killers
technically, you are much more likely to blame if that happens. No, I don’t think your brother is
[8] addicted to video games,
but I do think there are some bigger issues at play if he is struggling to keep a job. No, I really don’t know much about Minecraft
[9] but maybe you could try playing with your kid so they can teach you.
One of my favorite academic moments, is after a talk about my first book a woman asked me if her kids were ruining their social development or future careers by playing games all the time. I said I played games a lot as a kid and have a PhD now. The gamers in the audience burst into applause as I stood up for them to their proxy mother.
My own mother actually attended that talk, first and only time she has, and came up afterward to tell me
[10] how hilarious she thought it was that someone was asking me of all people for parenting advice.
And yet I often am. These conversations in public spaces are not as disheartening though, than in the seeming ahistorical understanding of game studies. Or at least a rehashing of the same debates with the conspicuous absence of marginalized folks who were making those same critiques decades ago.
[11] Understanding why this ahistory exists though is much more important to me than assigning blame. We are all enmeshed within systems that shape our trajectories, citations, and professionalization. It is only in understanding those systems that we can begin to unravel them. Because there are things we can certainly do at the individual level to ensure our work is better and more grounded. And somewhat counter intuitively I think the answer is encouraging better exploration rather that building firmer foundations. For example, when I first started doing game studies, I had little guidance.
[12] For one, I applied to grad school to study dyke and feminist comics. This was before Fun Home and feminist Frequency made Alison Bechdel a household name (among certain folks). I’d also happened to write about video games, which I’d started playing again because my job running the dairy section of an unnamed chain grocery store
[13] left me simultaneously under stimulated and too tired to do much else. It was suggested to me at prospective students day that one of the reasons they admitted me was that I said I would do work on games. So I did, which was the right choice but I like to imagine a parallel universe me has a giant stack of unread comics rather than a giant stack of unplayed games, but is probably still getting harassed by angry fans on the internet for trying to suggest their favorite medium could be more inclusive.
[14] Undirected I simply dove head first into all the game and computer and new media books I could find at the Library. And I read a lot…
[15] of crap. I read a lot of stuff I didn’t get. I also read some really great stuff. I read stuff that made me angry, happy, think. I read stuff that was not useful to me but that I can point students towards now. I read stuff that became relevant years later.
[16] I felt around until I thought I could mostly see the shape of the game studies elephant…but then after a while I realized I was in a zoo. There are so many animals in the game studies zoo. Instead of being frightening though, it was exciting. I can be any animal I want, so I chose my favorite
[17] I sunk deep into multiple different literatures because between games studies, communication and media studies, cultural studies, and liberal arts training…interdisiplinarity is what I know.
[18] This is why, in a recent interview with Kishonna Gray she asked me for my go to advice for emerging game scholars. And my number one piece of advice to all students is
[19] Read as far back as you can find stuff and then look some more. I recognize there is just substantially more Game Studies work to sift through now than when I started, but it is still an important exercise.
[20] I tell my students, each article or book is a node in a network of knowledge building. This kind of all encompassing reading also, it taught me the very valuable lesson of “never say no one has ever______ before”—because you are probably wrong. And read from other fields! Media and communication studies and game studies have asked very similar questions before, and I found in my work it helped to bring them together. No field is an island. At her recent Penn’s Humanities forum talk, Rebecca Solnit encouraged us to think about intersectionality not just in terms of identifies, but of fields. What productive questions can we ask when we put bodies of work into conversation with one another. At the same time, how can we help each other find the elusive “right thing to cite?” before Reviewer 2 has a go at bolstering our imposter syndrome.
[21] What I like to imagine sometimes, is what game studies would look like if we built up rather than always creating a new foundations each time we create a new area.
[22] If we imagine an amorphous/fluid structure that adapted, rather than firmly built siolos and gated communities. Game studies is an interdisciplinary field that takes games, and increasingly play more broadly, as a starting point in discussions about meaning, culture, power, effects and affects, sociality, art, identity, economics, psychology, education, history, religion, production and consumption, agency, etc. Sure many of us focus specifically on digital games, but that is not the beginning and end of game studies. Moreover, I have met and read the work of game scholars who come from widely diverse academic backgrounds. I do think there is a conceptual center to game studies, as there is to communication studies, but I think even if we define it as a field– it’s a pretty big field without a fence.
[23] I personally don’t worry about any of the cows (sacred or otherwise) escaping if we don’t construct a sturdy fence around our area of study. And if some interesting new sheep come wandering in, maybe they’ll teach us that there is more to our field than what we originally thought.
[24] Pause for escaped cows
[25] Despite being around for decades, game studies still has tons of space to grow. I do think that we need more (just fundamentally more) writing about race, class, religion, disability, nationality, non-binary gender, and masculinity in games. There are so many other axes of identity that we could be exploring as well as the intersections of these subject positions. There are entire areas of the world that are underrepresented in game studies. I’d like to see more and better games history. All of these though require game scholars generally be more flexible about the types of play and games they consider studying. We, like our industry, often jump to the new and exciting but that means we do not research the old and the mundane as much as we should. I think there is room in our field for all of this work to be done, but we need to support the people doing it.
I tell my students, do not study something just because it is hip right now or because you think no one else has studied it yet (especially because someone else probably has studied it, you just haven’t found them yet). Study it because you have questions about it, something to say about it, a new take on it, etc. If your experience of gaming isn’t reflected in what you’ve read in game studies, make that a project. I focused on solo play because that’s how I play games, even when it seemed like everyone else was studying MMORPGs. It led me to different questions and answers than trying to throw myself into online gaming would have done. One of the problems I see is that in a field as young as ours we so often see fit to describe our subjects in such broad strokes, that we somehow seem to forget that we were there too. And more than that, we were all there.
[26] At different times, at different ages, but we might start by considering that within the big broad field we call game studies we ourselves have so many different experiences with and within games that we could do a better job of acknowledging internally that we cannot all recognize our experiences within what has thus been written in our field.
[27] As one example, let’s take the common knowledge that video games used to just be for guys and are now, in an ever present now that never becomes a then, gaining more female players. We all KNOW this. We also KNOW that girls and boys are discrete and knowable categories, and easy stand ins for men and women who are clearly just grown up boys and girls.
[28] <sarcasm detected>
[29] If we look though, we can see clearly that women have been playing games all along.
[30] For over a decade the ratios in the ESA data have shifted, but the gender divide hasn’t been more than 60/40 for much of the past decade.
[31] Even Sophia from the Golden Girls had a Gameboy, if only for one episode.
For those of you either too old or young to remember,
[32] Clarissa explained it all…with video games… she made herself.
[33] Yet we are repeatedly told, sometimes tell ourselves, with a note of surprise that “nearly half of all video gamers are women. We are often told repeatedly that there are innate gender differences that explained the gaming divide though.
[34] But we had critiques of this as well even in the 90s. In the introduction to the original collection Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins write “We hope this anthology will encourage all of us to examine our core assumptions about gender and games, and propose different tactical approaches for bridging the digital gender gap” (p. 3). The book is identifies a problem: girls don’t seem to be playing computer games as much as boys. They were writing in a context where publicly people were wary of games, aware of the very gendered nature of digital game play, and public discussions of computer game play being a stepping stone in STEM fields…. A place we haven’t really left, or at least seem to have come back to. Then it offers multiple different perspectives on possible solutions. Despite the way people summarize it, the book as a whole does not in fact treat gender as monolithic and binary; much of the introduction is about how differences in computer game use by boys and girls is socially constructed.
Does every chapter in the book talk about gender with nuance, or acknowledge intersectionality, no. And I think class and race are implied in the background of several pieces but never brought into the foreground as intersecting with gender in producing particular types of players. Yet the book as a whole chronicles a particular era of the “girls’ games” movement while also exploring critiques of it. For much of graduate school I had a quote from Nikki Douglas’s essay next to my computer:
[35] Maybe it’s a problem…that little girls DON’T like to play games that slaughter entire planets. Maybe that’s why we are still underpaid, still struggling, still fighting for our rights. Maybe if we had the mettle to take on an entire planet, we could fight some of the smaller battles we face every day. Women are not Men and Men are not Women, but all Women are not members of the doily of the month club either. (p. 334)
We can critique a lot in this quote to be sure, but remembering 90s game culture largely through the lens of corporate products and marketing we lose the everyday critique being made by a wide swath of players at that time.
[36] In another book from a year earlier, JC Herz critiquing the essentializing way games for girls are imagined writes: “While girls are buys playing Barbie Fashion Designer, guys are jostling to play female kickboxing champs and action adventure heroines. They’re playing these empowered women, kicking ass and taking names while their sisters concentrate of making computerized mannequins look glamourous. When it comes to videogames, teenage boys, are the ones with positive female role models” (p. 182).
Again, we can critique this…but that would require citing it. Engaging with it. Not in a parenthetical citation in a list of others, but actually including it as part of the picture of what gaming was in the 90s.
[37] The bulk of From Barbie to Mortal Kombat was certainly focused on children, and for this one book that was not a problem as much as it was that game studies at the time tended to focus only on children when discussing the “digital gender gap.” I think the focus on justifying games as an entry point to STEM made sense, but I truly don’t think that is a productive argument. I think once we argue for the right to participate in cultural products in terms of productivity we rob ourselves of the simple human joy of finding pleasures in a variety of activities. I get it from an applying for grants perspective, but I wish we could say we could say it is simply not fair to exclude large groups of people from an activity for completely preventable forms of disenfranchisement and harassment. The book makes an effort in that direction by asserting that there is not “natural” sex or gender difference that makes computer game play more or less appealing. I’d push more that computer games do not have to be an entry point to particular types of career for it to be a good idea that some of them are made to appeal to more types of players.
[38] But we should also, and always, remember that games do not just exist as playable objects. We had cartoons and live action shows, even game shows about video games. Games were turned into movies (often wonderfully bad ones). Our shows were often then turned into video games (often wonderfully bad ones). Game culture, certainly has been constructed as something separate from “mainstream culture,” but games have been an integrated part of popular culture for decades. I wish we had a better accounting of that. We do have several excellent accountings of how games were associated with specific types of hetero/cis masculinity—none of which I can cite because of the rules of this talk—but I have always wanted another history too. Because my experience with games does not come across in most of the studies I read.
[39] When I played video games, it was with my mother and sister or girls we knew. There were no guy friends, husbands, or brothers in our gaming origin stories. Indeed while I can point to specific men as part of my gaming history, I met all of them through women. My research is built on a woman-centric gaming experience—
[40] <don’t read, just put up slide>
I want to imagine a game studies where that is not just exceptional, or a counter narrative though. I want it to be part of the big picture understanding of what games and game play are. As a qualitative researcher one of the key lessons I impart on my students is that in qualitative methods you don’t ignore the exceptional. You try to understand the points of data that do not fit neatly into trends to see what bigger themes they reveal.
[41] I’ll give you an example: pop culture tells us gamers are anti-social. Game studies demonstrates gamers are SUPER SOCIAL. I play games to be anti-social, there for I do not exist….
So maybe, just maybe, the finding is not gamers are SOCIAL, but that games are a way to mediate or avoid particular forms of sociality. Less pithy, sure, but more accurate and less marginalizing. Put in another sphere:
[42] Women are feminine, I am not feminine, therefore I am not a woman. Yet if we redefine and base womanhood on bodies, where does that leave trans men and women, non-binary and gender queer folk? Better definitions don’t help us because the process of defining is always so limiting, so myopic, so violent.
[43] Unless of course you are the Merriam-Webster Twitter account who only use them for righteous trolling. Which isn’t to say definitions are never useful, but we should be aware of the work they do.
[44] And this reclaiming of history is part of the impetus for the project I’ve been working on for the last two years: the LGBTQ games archive. Part research project, part preservation effort, and part public resource, it is a collection of information about all LGBTQ content (from characters to one off mentions) in digital games dating back to the 1980s. And one of the key findings in that project is that despite the increase in LGBTQ game content since the 1980s, the quality and depth of the content hasn’t really changed that much. Complexity existed in the 80s, so did oppressive imagery, much as it does now.
[45] Game studies, like games themselves, seem to repeat debates (as any one following the Gamesnetwork list serv may have noticed). And to some extent that is simply true of academia generally. We repeat debates because they are never truly settled. I’m not interested in ending debates, but I do think we could do a better job of accounting for what has been said, particularly by marginalized folks, before jumping in. Two of my favorite books that I never see cited that I found in this time and recently reread I think nicely demonstrate this point…
[46] Patricia Greenfield’s Mind and Media and Marsha Kinder’s Playing With Power
[47] At the start of her 1984 chapter on video games Greenfield through all of the classic moral panics against games, including addiction and violence, and the evidence that counters them.
She writes: “Thus, the available evidence indicates that video games are, in terms of time spent, much less addictive than television. Nor are they, in comparison with other entertainment, particularly expensive. Yet they are undeniably attractive, and there is something about that attraction that disturbs people. Before deciding that video games are bad simply because they are attractive, it makes sense to consider what features make them so attractive.” (p. 70)
Then she goes through all of the valuable skills players can learn or practice through games, from spatial reasoning to creative thinking to scaffolding. All the hallmarks of games and learning literature today though by comparison citations for Greenfield lag far behind similar arguments published in the 2000s (which also don’t cite her). She even includes a brief discussion of disability, arguing that games can provide instruction for students who struggle with traditional education.
[48] Marsha Kinder was literally writing about my childhood though via her son and his friends. I actually didn’t appreciate this book for what it was until rereading it last year. I am able to unpack my own experiences through her parental/academic gaze, while also positioning my own understanding of her son’s media consumption. Her exploration of intertextual and transmedia storytelling merges psychoanalysis and cognitive science in ways that are fascinating. She also discusses, citing Greenfield, the dangers of games being framed as only for boys, but she takes this further to raise similar concerns for race and class if games are “targeted primarily for a white middle-class audience.” She also builds on the disability studies read of Greenfield in discussing the therapeutic values of games for a wide array of ages, embodiment, and types of cognition. It offers a concise history of the fall of Atari and rise of Nintendo, and describes games integration with children’s popular culture in the late 80s and early 90s as well as flows of global media systems. In doing so she ends on a prescient prediction on the future of media through which we could easily read our contemporary political and mediated moment: “Players who are skillful at forestalling obsolescence, castration, and death through a savoring of transmedia referentiality, fluid movement between cinematic suture and interactive play, and (as Beverle Houston wrote of television) ‘an extremely intense miming of the sliding and multiplicity of the signifier.’ Together we are also helping to accelerate the redefinition of movies, television programs, commercials, compact discs, video games, computer programs, interactive multimedia, corporations, nations, politicians, superstars, and toys as amphibious software– any one of which can be used to promote the other in a gigantic network of commercial intertextuality…. As advertised, we are the multinational team that is ‘playing with power.’”
[49] More than that, while writing this book she also began work on a project where she tried to “develop electronic games that use transformational imagery to explore the fluidity of personal, cultural, and historical identity.” The end result was Runaways, which she talks about in an interview in the original From Barbie to Mortal Kombat. It never got past the prototype stage in large part because the CD-rom market declined as they worked on it, but in addition to engaging in community centered design the character creation screen was meant to be a direct lesson in intersectionality. From Kinder’s own page about the project: “When players fill out the ID card, they are asked to import their own picture, give their date of birth, describe their physical build, and specify their biological sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and race. The mere fact that they need to identify both race and ethnicity makes them think about the difference between those concepts. The same is true, of course, for gender, biological sex, and sexual orientation, which are usually conflated into simple binaries of male/female and straight/gay but which are separated here (with four choices for each) so that players can consider the complexity of these categories. If they want to know more about any of these choices, they can click on the “Help” button and see brief quick-time animated movies on each topic. These movies also show how gender and sexuality are related to other issues of identity–such as, class, ethnicity and race.”
[50] Moving forward about a decade in a half, we have three books that explore the complexity of analyzing game texts, game play, and the games industry. I don’t really believe much in canons, but when students new to critical game studies ask me where to start I list these three books. They offer nuance, global perspective, thinking about games beyond the text, and a critical largely feminist take on games, and yet aside from Taylor’s I rarely see the other two referenced.
[51] Moreover, just focused on representation, pushing past the long over until they aren’t fights over ludology and narratology, three of the most useful pieces I’ve found about thinking expansively about representation of different identities in games are Jane Pinckard’s 2003, Dean Chan’s 2005, and Vit Sisler’s 2006 work on the subject.
Adding to this T.L. Taylor’s 2009 assemblage of play and we have a rich starting point to analyzing games as texts that can be holistic. Yet I constantly see new articles seeking to reinvent the wheel—perhaps because they’ve been told that’s a good way to get citations. And that isn’t to say I don’t think people are asking different questions in different contexts, but the absences in our bibliographies are telling and consistent in who gets ignored.
[52] And returning to this talk’s title, and playing a little fast and lose with my own rules…Calls for intersectional game studies are not new, and yet I often find myself at conferences and symposia and workshops working out with other game scholars what intersectional approaches to our areas of study should look like. We are not alone in this,
[53] as Belkhir and Barnett point out in their review of race, gender, and class studies in Sociology. Tracing the intersectional turn in multiple disciplines they point to that fact that part of the problem lies in the very practical question of research design and norms of scholarly practice: “translating the theoretical call for studying the interlocking systems of oppression and the intersectionality of race, class and gender into theoretical and methodological practice are not easy.” Accounting for multiple access of oppression and privilege while also trying to make claims about how games function as cultural, social, and commercial projects is certainly difficult.
The trouble is…we have examples now! Some from the early 2000s and before, some more recent, but if you look for it is it there. Not all of it is as nuanced as it might be, for sure. Part of the issue may be that the word intersectional is not always used. Part of the reason for that might be that game studies was developed after intersectionality became a regular part of social science and humanities research.
[54] By the time our key journals and conferences were founded, intersectional research was simply what good research looked like—at least for those of us investigating questions of difference, access, and representation. More than that as Jenny Suden points out in her chapter calling for intersectionality in cyberfeminism, and as I’ll return to shortly, intersectionality itself has been around for much longer than we think of it as having been.
What is needed then are not more examples, not a template for intersectional games research, but rather a better understanding of why people think game scholarship has not already (and always) applied this lens. Part of the answer lies in the fact that the scholars doing this work are often pigeonholed on the very axes of identity we are trying to explore intersectionally.
[55] For example I have heard my book, Gaming at the Edge, described as either a book about female gamers or a book about queer gamers despite the fact that my interviewees were male, female, genderqueer, heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, queer, Black, white, Latinx, Middle Eastern, East and South Asian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Pagan, grew up in rural to urban spaces, and spanned the class spectrum.
The subtitle of the book is certainly partially to blame (sexuality and gender at the margins of gamer culture) as it obscures the importance of race in the book (it was the result of book marketing choices by my press).
Yet that cannot be the entire answer, in the same way I do not think that people associating Kishonna Gray’s work as being centrally about race is because she has been opaque about the importance of gender and sexuality in her work. We are both queer women doing intersectional games scholarship, and yet because I am white race is seen as not central to my work (much in the same way inhabiting a normative racial position means I do not have to think about my race much of the time) and because she is Black her work is seen as only about race (because as a woman of color her race is seen as the most salient part of her identity). Throughout academia, work on gender, race, class, and sexuality are often siloed. Moreover, as Belkhir and Barnett point out, the study of each category (race, gender, and class) is often marginalized in academic fields and the research itself done by those who are marginalized within academic spaces. The issue then is not that we need models of methods and modes of analysis, but rather to de-marginalize intersectional work. Unless all game scholars make intersectionality central to all of our work and understand our own positionality in relation to the research we produce, cite, and assign, then it will always seem like we need to go out of our way to do intersectional work.
[56] Intersectional game studies cannot happen though, until game scholars who are not studying marginalized groups have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of what intersectionality is. For one, intersectionality is not simply a matter of understanding inequality, though certainly its best articulations came in addressing intersecting forms of oppression. Intersectionality should not be offered as just another stand in for diversity, itself often used as a shorthand for increasing the quantity of particular groups’ representations without actually engaging with the politics of difference. White, cisgender male, middleclass gamers/developers/characters are intersectional identities as much as Black, transgender women, working class gamers/developers/characters are. In addition, I think it is important to remember that there is a specificity to certain groups’ experiences that are too easily ignored when we talk about intersectionality as simply about looking at gender, race, class, ability, and so on in the same projects. As I explore here, it is important to revisit the specifics of intersectionality and the theories of politics and identity it forced us to rethink.
[57] A quick Google image search for “intersectionality” results in various versions of overlapping circles with demographic variables inscribed within them, arrows labelled with similar identifiers pointing at stick figures, or images of those labels written on road sides. These images are a bit misleading though, as in my experience they tend to understand intersectionality as a question of addition: Black plus transwoman plus queer equals a greater sum total of oppression than white plus ciswoman plus heterosexual. And certainly, one of the most important contributions of intersectionality is the acknowledgement of interlocking forms of oppression that place additional burdens on particular bodies.
Yet the insight offered by intersectionality is not simple mathematics– it is physics. The experience of being a body in the world, the ability of a body to move through a world, is crucially shaped by the features of that body has and how those features interact with the features of other bodies.
[58] As Kishonna Gray writes, “although all oppressed groups share a common struggle, examining the intersecting nature of their realities reveals the distinctness of their lived experiences” (p. 359) A person who is Black, Muslim, and queer is allowed to move through the world in fundamentally different ways than someone who is white, Christian, and straight. More than that, intersectionality allows us to see that even each of those constituent parts of a body, what we might traditionally call identity, pull on each other in specific ways. To put it in oversimplified physics terms: each of the different atoms put together to make a body in the world affects how the other atoms behave and how they move in relation to other bodies in the world. Or as David Valentine discusses in relation to transgender as an identity category: “age, race, class, and so on don‘t merely inflect or intersect with those experiences we call gender and sexuality but rather shift the very boundaries of what gender and sexuality can mean in particular contexts.” Elizabeth Spelman argues, similarly, that far from distracting us from issues of gender, attention to race and class in fact help us to understand gender.”
[59] Intersectionality, moreover, was not invented in the 1990s even if that is when it entered academic conversations. Sojourner Truth’s 1851: “Ain’t I a Woman Speech” simultaneously critiques the notion that all women are oppressed in the same ways, that rights should stem from intellectual similarities, and in the end calls for a strategic grouping of women as revolutionary.
[60] The Combahee River Collective’s Statement in 1977 discusses the importance of fighting against interlocking systems of oppression:
We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.
Important to this approach, however, is not taking for granted what gendered and racial experiences are.
[61] In adapting this to critical race scholarship and introducing intersectionality to scholarly analysis, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that rather than assert that we can have no stable categories it is important to look at the experience of those living within multiple categories: “Through an awareness of intersectionality, we can better acknowledge and ground the differences among us and negotiate the means by which these differences will find expression in constructing group politics.” Crenshaw is not arguing for a new theory of identity; She’s arguing for a new accounting of it: “Intersectionality is not being offered here as some new, totalizing theory of identity…. My focus on the intersections of race and gender only highlights the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed.” The problem is that too often researchers deploy this in a way that takes for granted the construction of the categories which are intersecting. What we need is a version of intersectionality that also approaches identity in more complex ways, that is to say an approach that does not simply acknowledge that people have different sides to their identity but unpacks the implications those sides have in understanding the way their body moves through the world. This is what good games research simply should do in 2017, whether studying marginalized or mainstream gamers, games, and producers.
[62] Building on intersectional critique and modes of analysis, I think game scholars moving forward need to imagine our work in terms of coalitional politics. Rather than making space for people to work on questions of race and class in addition to gender, can we all think more critically about how ALL of our work is about race, class, gender, sexuality, etc. In our professional spaces, rather than make them simply inclusive can we look critically at what has structurally made them so homogenous. And once we find those structural explanations can we work actively to change those structures? Here I think Bernice Johnson Reagon’s discussion of coalitional politics is particularly valuable.
In her 1981 presentation to the West Coast Women’s Music Festival, Bernice Johnson Reagon articulates the difficulties within feminist movements that tried to be inclusive. She describes that in making nurturing spaces for women in a sexist world, white feminists found themselves creating white only spaces. In responding to their own insularity though, they did not really open the doors so much as they looked for Black women who already “fit in.” As she puts it: “You don’t really want Black folks, you are just looking for yourself with a little color to it.” This in turn leads to more diversity within the group (great!) and slowly makes it seem like maybe other Black folks can join these groups (great?). As she writes: So everybody who thinks they’re an X comes running to get into the room. And because you trying to take care of everything in this room, and you know you’re not racist, you get pressed to let us all in. The first thing that happens is that the room don’t feel like the room anymore. (Laughter) And it ain’t home no more. And she goes on to explain that coalition building necessarily cannot be about building a home where everyone gets to be. Homes are exclusionary; it is part of what makes them comfortable. Reagon writes: “Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort.” She warns her audience against people only dealing with one issue, one movement, or one action at a time. Rather what she presents is the idea that coalitions can empower us to work on multiple issues simultaneously. Not here I’ll help you and then you help me; but rather, here is a collective strategy that will allow both of us to achieve our goals. Later she writes: “It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world…. The ‘our’ must include everybody you have to include in order for you to survive.” That is what she means by coalitions. Not comfortable spaces where everyone gets to be, but an approach to collective action that acknowledges we all have to work together and that’s fucking hard. How do we bring that to game studies? How do we deploy intersectionality as not just at theoretical holisticness in studying representation and identity, but a coalitional approach to activism to more deeply change game studies?
[63] Going back to those house metaphors from the start of this talk…if coalition work is done in the streets then imagining our field as one that rests on firm foundations, siloed into gated communities of fields and disciplines will hinder our ability to engender true change. I don’t even know if an amorphous walking castle that we continuously add to can get us there either though. We need to think beyond the languages of fields, a single medium, even academia, to think intersectionally about our research and scholarship, our art and our activism and how they connect to the bigger world.
[64] And returning to that Rebecca Solnit talk I referenced before she had this really beautiful part reading from this published essay about the way that contemporary conservative right wing ideology insists that nothing is connected:
If you boil the strange soup of contemporary right-wing ideology down to a sort of bouillon cube, you find the idea that things are not connected to other things, that people are not connected to other people, and that they are all better off unconnected. The core values are individual freedom and individual responsibility: yourself for yourself on your own. Out of this Glorious Disconnect comes all sorts of illogical thinking. Taken to its conclusion, this worldview dictates that even facts are freestanding items that the self-made man can manufacture for use as he sees fit.
If we are going to fight that, we need to always insist that indeed everything is connected and that we have to stand united against attempts to make us feel isolated. That can’t just be a game studies project, but there is no reason we can’t do it from game studies too.
And finally, if nothing else, I’ll leave you with this rule of thumb I’ve often repeated to my students…
[65] Don’t be a jerk!
[66] Thank you!
Adrienne Shaw is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University, a member of the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication graduate faculty, and author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, winner of the 2016 International Communication Association’s Popular Communications Division’s Book Award.
