Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture
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Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture
A Book Talk with Amanda Phillips
Tuesday April 12, 2022
12 PM ET – Virtual Event
Captioned and ASL Interpreted
Presented by Gender+ Justice Initiative, DC Public Library, Women’s and Gender Studies Program and Women’s Center
Join us in welcoming Amanda Phillips for a discussion on their book, Gamer Trouble: Feminist Confrontations in Digital Culture (NYU Press, 2020).
Moderated by Soraya Murray, Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz
As our popular understanding of “gamer” shifts beyond its historical construction as a white, straight, adolescent, cisgender male, the troubles that emerge both confirm and challenge our understanding of identity politics. In Gamer Trouble, Amanda Phillips takes readers under the hood of the mechanisms of video games in order to understand the ways that difference gets baked into its technological, ludic, ideological, and social systems.
By centering the insights of queer and women of color feminisms in readings of online harassment campaigns, industry animation practices, and popular video games like Portal and Mass Effect, Phillips adds essential analytical tools to our conversations about video games. They embrace the trouble that attends disciplinary crossroads, linking the violent hate speech of trolls and the representational practices marginalizing people of color, women, and queers in entertainment media to the dehumanizing logic undergirding computation and the optimization strategies of gameplay. As reinvigorated forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia thrive in games and gaming communities, Phillips follows the lead of those who have been making good trouble all along, agitating for a better world.
This event is free and open to all
About the author:
Amanda Phillips (they/he/she) is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. Amanda writes about sex, death, identity, and politics in video games, with a particular emphasis on centering the insights of queer women of color feminism in the study of technology. Their work can be found in publications such as Feminist Media Histories, Queer Game Studies, and the Queer/Trans/Digital book series with NYU Press, among many other places. Amanda is a butch/transmasculine, Latinx, first-generation college graduate who is here to leverage their white-passing privilege and institutional resources for the revolution. @ them to collaborate or make trouble.
More information about Gamer Trouble:
Interview: Episode 210: Gamer Trouble, A Conversation with Amanda Phillips – NYMG, feminist game studies
Purchase book – Publisher Page
Accommodation requests can be made at genderjustice@georgetown.edu