Not Playing Around: Feminist and Queer Rhetorics in Videogames

NOT PLAYING AROUND: FEMINIST AND QUEER RHETORICS IN VIDEOGAMES examines how videogames function rhetorically to have material, affective, and embodied consequences. Rebecca S. Richards argues that playing videogames has a resistant rhetorical impact equivalent to other rhetorical acts such as giving a speech or writing a letter. Building upon extant videogame scholarship, Richards shows how these artifacts are urgent exigencies about gender and sexuality, presenting the audience with opportunities to practice rhetorical listening and silence, engage strategic contemplation, stealth transnational surveillance, and model disorientation and failure in a white supremacist, patriarchal capitalistic world. By default, videogames are forcibly transnational texts-texts that are created and circulate inside and across nation-state boundaries, which make them compelling sites for investigating how gender and sexuality are national social constructs with global implications.

NOT PLAYING AROUND builds upon and pulls together several thriving areas of academic inquiry with the explicit intent of moving the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series into conversation with videogames as texts. Not Playing Around expands the conversations of videogames and rhetoric to include theories and issues of gender and sexuality. While acknowledging that videogames can circulate oppressive ideologies, Richards analyzes videogames that engender nuanced engagement with gender and sexuality. These games require serious play and astute rhetorical negotiation, holding tremendous power for players.

REBECCA S. RICHARDS is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research and teaching explore the intersection of rhetoric, gender and sexuality, and media. Her first book, Transnational Feminist Rhetorics and Gendered Leadership in Global Politics: From Daughters of Destiny to Iron Ladies (Lexington Books 2015), analyzes how gendered concepts circulate among women who have been world leaders. Her work also appears in journals, such as Feminist Formations, Feminist Teacher, and Kairos, as well as in edited collections, such as Hillary Rodham Clinton and the 2016 Election.