Come see me speak in Providence, Williams, or Seattle this Spring!

In the hope of seeing new colleagues and familiar faces, I have just added information about my travels this Spring to the Talks section of this site. I have three presentations coming up so far, and I would love to see you there!

On Sunday January 27, 2019 I will be speaking in Providence, Rhode Island on “The History and Geography of Queer Game Studies: Recovering and Imagining LGBTQ Spaces in Video Game Design.” The talk is from 1:00-1:45 at the Center for Digital Scholarship in Brown University’s Rockefeller Library. My presentation is part of Playing the Past: Archaeology and Video-Games Play Well With Each Other, organized by Carl Walsh and Eva Mol. There will also be a Twine workshop on Monday, January 28 led by Angus Mol and Aris Politopoulos of the VALUE Foundation!

Next, I am headed to Williams College in Massachusetts to present on my latest work in a talk called “Queer Games After Empathy”. The event will be on Friday February 22, 2019 from 4:00-5:30 PM at Williams College’s Sawyer Library Mabie Room. It is free to the public, so if you are in the area, please come by! Many thanks to Ianna Hawkins Owen for inviting me to speak at her institution.

Finally, on Friday March 13, 2019, I’ll be in Seattle, Washington for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies International Conference at the Sheraton Seattle. My short talk, “Queer Erasure, Transformation, and the Disappearing Archive in Video Game Studies,” is part of a panel called “The End of Queerness” with Josef Nguyen, Amanda Phillips, and Bonnie Ruberg. It’s programmed against many other amazing panels in Session L (1:30-2:45pm), but please do join us if you have space in your schedule!

"Queerness and Games" is Out in Camera Obscura!

Way back in October of 2015, the idea was born for a special "In Practice" section of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies introducing Feminist Film and Media Studies (the discipline I was trained in) to Queer Game Studies (the emerging discipline I had been working with more recently). I would be shaping and organizing the section with the help of two scholars who helped found the Queerness and Games Conference at UC Berkeley in 2013: Bonnie ("Bo") Ruberg, and Christopher Goetz. Just this week, the issue featuring our section, "In Practice: Queerness and Games," came out online. For subscribers, issue 95 should be arriving in your mailbox within the next 1-2 weeks! 

The idea for our "In Practice" section began at QGCon 2015 at UC Berkeley. The organizers all wore Pikachu hats to the closing session; aren't we cute? Left to Right: Bonnie ("Bo") Ruberg, Teddy Pozo (me), Zoyander Street, Dietrich Squinkifer, and Christopher Goetz. Not pictured is co-organizer Chelsea Howe.

Working on this section has been an incredible learning opportunity that has helped me grow as a scholar, and to find a supportive community of collaborators. Bo and Chris generously helped draft and edit an introduction to the section, and Patricia White and Chip Badley at Camera Obscura were the shepherding editor and managing editor for the section respectively. Working with Patty again, years after she mentored me at Swarthmore College, was a particular privilege. 

I hope this section will open the area of "queerness and games" to feminist and queer scholars across media studies, showing how the framework of queer game studies helps build and complicate video game theory, just as feminist film studies and feminist film theory has shaped so much of film and media studies as we know it today. It features two excellent pieces from QGCon, as well as one interview highlighting queerness and games work outside the conference.

Bonnie Ruberg's interview with Adrienne Shaw, "Creating an Archive of LGBTQ Video Game Content," explores the methodological complexity of queer game studies through a conversation about the creation of the first scholarly database of queer content in video games, the LGBTQ Video Game Archive. Shaw's work exposes some uncomfortable truths about the history of video games, such as the lack of representation of the AIDS crisis in games of the 1980s and 90s. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of fans and scholars, whose attentiveness to even small queer moments produces a kind of queer game studies in practice.

Dietrich Squinkifer's "Conferences, Conventions, and Coffee" shows how the author's interactive play Coffee: A Misunderstanding follows feminist film theorists' strategies of interrogating the symbolic work done by cinema to construct and maintain binary gender and heteronormativity, applying these interrogations to the big-budget "AAA" games industry and the format of the fan convention. As Coffee is typically performed at conventions, it also provides metacommentary on the events at which it appears. I can confirm that Coffee radically reshaped my experience of my own gender and sexuality in relation to others at QGCon 2014, in the best of ways!

Finally, Claudia Lo's "Everything is Wiped Away: Temporality in Queers in Love at the End of the World" looks at Anna Anthropy's 2014 Twine game Queers in Love at the End of the World through the lens of José Esteban Muñoz's call toward queer futurity and the yearning to be lost. Be careful if you click on the link above; Queers in Love is a real tearjerker. Lo perfectly captures the ways in which the game's innovatively brief temporal mechanics represent a queer approach to game design.

Though the section is made up of short pieces, it represents two years of work for me and all the contributors. If you read it, please let me know what you think! This is just the beginning for queer game studies, so let's start a conversation about the possible interaction of feminist film and media studies and queer approaches to video games. I also invite you to use your background in feminist film and media studies to bring a new voice to the queer game studies field, fandom, and movement, through research, analysis, or game design! I can't wait to see more from my colleagues in this area. Happy reading!