“Pretty good for a girl”: A feminist content analysis of female video game characters, and interviews with female gamers

Feminist media scholars have long sought to understand the representations of women in the media, in which women are consistently depicted as secondary to men, which they have used to highlight issues of gender relations. My research involved the analysis of representations of female characters in games and explored how female gamers make sense of them, providing a more in-depth look at women in the media, whilst also addressing issues of gender such as leisure time. The gendering of leisure is important as it provides a wider basis for my more nuanced arguments about video games and those who play them. Throughout my research I endeavoured to study not only how women are represented in video games, but also the experiences of female gamers and how they continue to interact with the gaming community. Drawing widely from existing feminist media research, I studied the common representations of women in video games, and what female gamers thought of them. I also researched their experiences as female gamers within the gaming community – how they had been treated as “gamers”, but also how they continued to engage and interact with the gaming community. In order to gather this information, I utilised Content Analysis to gather and analyse game content through further Visual Analysis. This provided me with a range of insights into common patterns in the representations of women across a wide range of currently popular games, such as the role of healer. As for the experiences and engagement of gamers, I utilised interviews to gather information from individuals and tracked patterns across their experiences as a whole. Most notable are the issues of abuse and harassment, but also how women continue to engage with gaming and create their own “safe spaces” within the community both for themselves and others

The major and the minor on political aesthetics in the control society

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production

W.B. Yeats: Searching for a National Identity through the Ritual of Theatre

W.B. Yeats was a leading figure in the Irish Literary Revival, a movement which set out to promote Irish literature in an attempt to create a sense of national pride and identity amongst its people. As part of this movement, Yeats and his colleagues established the National Theatre Society, with the aim of raising the awareness of the Irish to their cultural heritage through the medium of theatre. This thesis sets out to show that Yeats’ dramatic works made little impact on the national consciousness, primarily because the plays were more concerned with the expression of his personal views and ideals, and the development of his own dramatic career as an innovator of theatrical experimentation. The dramas presented a Romanticised and “ideal” Ireland that was of little relevance to the everyday lives of its people and did not take into account the prevailing religious beliefs, nor the cultural and social circumstances of the time. Yeats also used his plays as vehicles to express his annoyance and frustration at what he viewed to be the increasingly narrow-minded and petty attitudes of his fellow countrymen. The highly ritualistic and symbolic form of drama that Yeats adopted for his productions culminated in the plays based on the Japanese Noh form of theatre: these works demonstrated ground-breaking theatrical techniques but were set at an intellectual and “otherworldly” level that placed them beyond the reach of the average theatregoer. A selection of plays from the period mid-1890s-1916 will be discussed with particular attention given to subject matter, language style and form, stage setting and method of acting. The aim is to show how Yeats’ use of these elements tended to hinder rather than help his nationalistic endeavours. The discussion will take into account the social conditions of Dublin and the demographic of the typical audience member at the turn of the twentieth century

Games with Words: Textual Representation in the Wake of Graphical Realism in Videogames

Much of the videogame industry is based around a model of technological progress, whereby developers, individual videogames, and videogame platforms are lauded as superior based on their engagement with the latest, cutting edge forms of technology. As a direct consequence of this focus, sophisticated graphic-based representations are often employed as a yardstick for technological superiority, as it is a form of advancement that can be discerned by the naked eye. The focus on graphics has a number of consequences: it presents past videogames as inferior realizations that pale before more modern approaches; it favors image-based representation over other representational forms such as text; it enters videogames into a broader, ongoing debate in Western culture regarding mimesis and representations of reality that pit image and text against each other. An alternative to the graphic-dominated history of videogames is a variantological approach, in which marginalized and past forms of representation are not seen as dead ends and failures, but as variants that offer alternative perspectives. To that end, this dissertation analyzes five different text-based variant approaches that present ways of considering videogames apart from the dominant narrative of technology-driven graphical realism. First, the history of the instruction manual illustrates how a text-based paratext functions in regards to videogames, which can be viewed as reinforcing the technology-driven approach to videogames—up to and including technology rendering the manual defunct—but can also illustrate a second history, one which explores how a manual as paratext acts to support videogames through incorporation of other print media forms such as the comic book or the picturebook, through presenting a model of the ideal gamer, and through presenting the manual itself as an object from within the videogame. Second, in the history of videogame technology, the 1980s are a crucial period, in which console systems developed an image-based vocabulary for nascent players to learn, and the text-based videogames of the personal computer looked to literary models to do what the image-based games could not; the 1989 Amiga game It Came From the Desert represents the moment when text and image cease to be competing forms and turn into formations more complementary. Third, in the 1990s, this balance shifts towards image with the advent of 3D immersive graphics, and the dominance of graphic-based realism, as illustrated through DOOM and Myst—though both games not only used text, but depended on it to engage players to enter into make-believe, mimetic games with their respective gameworlds. In the face of graphical realism’s dominance, the 1999 computer game Planescape: Torment stands out as a text-heavy variant, illustrating the ability of textual representation to engage with mimesis-as-make-believe and offer an alternative to graphical realism through self-inscription, the presentation of text, and a gameworld based on the power of belief and words. Finally, a fifth approach to textual variants comes through a consideration of the role of the text-centred artifact the book within videogames, which presents a wide variety of uses including the book as epitext, book as narrative frame, book as menu system, book as found object, and book as allusive structure

Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and the Far Right

The publication of this work was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis have all, to varying degrees, been the subject of studies that explore their ideology. All too often, however, these studies have not tackled the issue adequately, limiting their analytical approach to fascism or other phenomena such as anti-Semitism. Frequently, they have also sought to exculpate these writers or to normalise their political tendencies in an effort to circumnavigate the dilemma of how to address the paradox of right-wing artists who are both harbingers and opponents of the imagined trajectory of progressive modernity. This interdisciplinary study analyses the connections between literary Modernism and right-wing ideology. Moreover, it is the first academic study to explore the reception of these Modernist authors by today's far right, seeking to understand in what ways they use strategic readings of Modernist texts to legitimise right-wing ideology. By raising fundamental questions about the relationship between aesthetics and politics, this study ultimately challenges its readers to see their cultural practices as political. It wants to make visible and problematize the interdependencies of right-wing ideology and cultural production as well as reception in order to explain the (far) Right as a phenomenon deeply rooted in European history and cultural development. It thus lays bare the misconceptions, the gaps as well as the complicity in the debate about right-wing ideology in literature

RPG: Role-playing gender, and how the game industry has sustained and defied sexism

Despite the wider cultural progress of gender equality, game content which perpetuates sexist beliefs about gender is uncomfortably common. Games have historically used narrative and programmed mechanics to advocate that women are valuable only when performing exaggerated femininity – they must look and behave biologically female, even when playing as non-human races. Game content suggests that women desire play such as fighting from a distance, healing, and otherwise supporting the masculine, combative role while being denied equal agency. From this viewpoint, women are at their most feminine – their ‘ideal’ state – when they are objectified, and as cultural artefacts games reveal society’s adherence of the same values: sexist content articulates the dichotomy of man=capable, woman=incapable that structures Western culture. Yet there are signs of change in both games and the industry, and the thesis explores the power of sexist representations and the progress toward inclusive game content. The industry is increasingly representing women and marginalised groups in ways which highlight intellectual solutions over the use of force, explore non-heterosexual sexuality, or feature cooperation that encourages relations of equality beyond gender boundaries, as well as empowered female characters whose stories overcome sexism, racism, and other forms of oppression. ‘RPG: Role-Playing Gender’ looks at games using a mixed-methodological approach which combines ‘close readings’ of games as texts alongside other popular culture and art forms, ethnographic surveys of game communities, and interviews with members of the gaming world. What do sexist representations communicate to players concerning female power and gender roles? What specific gender-based characteristics do players adopt for in-game gender performance? How do game communities facilitate player/player interaction, especially those based on assumptions about gender trends, in ways non-virtual spaces cannot? What stories and mechanics might games adopt to represent women and marginalised groups in ways which normalise and celebrate diversity

Intimate Cartographies: Irish and Diasporic Explorations of Gendered Space

Juxtaposing different chronological periods and genres from the ninth century to the present, Intimate Cartographies contends that contemporary Irish and diasporic artists employ an “ecologistical,” anthropocenic aesthetics in an effort to re-territorialize geopolitical, sociocultural, and “psychic space.” Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Nora Roberts, Nuala O’Faolain, and Tana French, among others, explore the gendered body politic of the Irish State and of individuals in various milieux. My dissertation contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts from W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, and James Joyce to John Ford and Francis Bacon. Poised at the intersection of postcolonial cultural geography, transnational feminisms, and various theologies in engagement with various media from international archives, Intimate Cartographies demonstrates the ways in which contemporary authors and filmmakers cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological “Fifth Space” of cultural actualization beyond borders. Through radical awareness of embeddedness in their respective environments, these writers/filmmaker-cartographers reshape Ireland both as real landscape and fantasy island, traversed in order to negotiate place in terms of terrain and subjectivity both within and outside of history in the realm of desire. I chart mutual fascinations and engagements with the biopolitics of transformative (re)production in spatial, communal, and intimate mis-en-scènes in addition to the dearth of comparative work concerning Irish-language, Anglo-Irish, and diasporic cultural production across forms necessitates such a uniquely geofeminist, bilingual study of these neglected artists. Ireland in these terms is charted through places on the map which address and redress past imaginings of both sovereignty and gender as they continue to be palimpsestically refigured in the present.Doctor of Philosoph