Emma Vossen will be speaking at the Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal (QGCon will take place September 29 and 30). Her talk entitled "Queering the Links Between Sexual Orientation and the Female Gamer Identity" explores how sexuality interacts with female gamer identity formation.
For the past six years, Emma's work has focused on investigating the nuances of gender discrimination and gate keeping that make games culture less accessible to women and non-binary people (download her PhD dissertation here) (Vossen, 2018a). Now she is shifting gears to present new research on a complex, understudied aspect of games culture: how does sexuality interact with the formation of the gamer identity?
Emma explains that her motivation for the new research came from questions she has been grappling with for some time but hasn't had the opportunity to explore academically: "why are so many of the female gamers I know (especially within the field of game studies) queer? And, is my attraction to women somehow connected to my gamer identity?" (Vossen, 2018b).
Emma's preliminary research into this question asks how the experiences of queer women and heterosexual women differ when experiencing the hyper-sexualized female characters and ever-present damsel-in-distress tropes within games. In this presentation, Emma will argue that her attraction to women could have actually made consuming games comparatively more accessible to herself (and potentially other women and non-binary people who are attracted to women) as opposed to heterosexual women.
Her research approach integrates interviews with hetero and queer people and analysis of her own autoethnographic experience. "Because this is very new research I don’t expect to answer these questions in my talk, but I do hope to open up avenues of investigation to pursue in future work" (Vossen, 2018b).
Works
Vossen, E. (2018a). "On the cultural inaccessbility of gaming: Invading, creating, and reclaiming the cultural clubhouse". available on UWSpace. https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/13649
Vossen, E. (2018b). "Queering the links between sexual orientation and the female gamer identity". QGCon. https://qgcon.com/qgcon-2018/talks/queering-the-links-between-sexual-orientation-and-the-female-gamer-identity/
For more information about the Queerness and Games Conference, click here