1. Accepted (Console-ing Passions 2008)
“’Bringing Home the Cat’: Gender, Violence, and Militarism in BSG”
Even before the the miniseries that began the current “reimagining” of Battlestar Galactica premiered on Sky Television, gender issues were causing controversy for the writers of the series. In the first place, the casting of Katee Sackhoff in the role of Viper pilot Starbuck (played by Dirk Benedict in the original) caused a battle between more Neanderthal fans and the series’s producers and writers. According to Benedict himself, in the new BSG, “40 years of feminism have taken their toll. The war against masculinity has been won” and the narrative is entirely “female-driven.” The original BSG, continued Benedict, a “television show based on hope, spiritual faith, and family,” has been “unimagined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence, and family dysfunction” (http://www.dirkbenedictcentral.com/home/articles-archive.php).
Beginning with this simplistic backlash reading of the figure of the cigar-chomping, hard-drinking, sexually active Starbuck, this paper examines the complexities of gender in the militarized world of BSG, a world in which, as Donna Haraway once put it, “mundane fictions of Male and Female” are problematized and undone. For example, the world of the contemporary BSG is an uncertain one that refuses to reproduce the benevolent patriarchy and attendant gender norms characteristic of science fiction programming of the Reagan era. The “reimagined” BSG also added a central female character in the role of the President Laura Roslin of the Twelve Colonies who, despite her background in the stereotypical role of school teacher, shows an unexpected ruthlessness when it comes to dealing with the Cylons. Violence is the province of neither masculinity nor femininity in BSG and the series’ representations of militarism and state violence offer a unique lens onto the moral complexities of an era similarly marked by violence and perpetual war.
Example 2: Accepted (American Studies Association 2009)
“Where There’s Red Smoke, There’s Usually Communist Fire”: The Broadcast Blacklist and Political Dissent
Carol A. Stabile
As the terrorist attacks of 2001, and the hasty passage of the US Patriot Act less than two months later, remind us, periods of intense militarization in the US historically have been moments that energize rightwing forces and that disable conditions for dissent. Nowhere is this disabling of dissent more apparent, perhaps, than in media industries, which in the days and weeks following the US invasion of Afghanistan and the long, anxious months leading up to the beginning of the invasion of Iraq reaffirmed themselves as lapdogs of state power, refusing to criticize the Bush Administration’s aggression, its secrecy, and its myriad abuses of power.
Although broadcast media in particular are cannibalistic, insofar as they constantly recycle genres, images and ideologies of Americanism that they themselves have created, the mandates of the industry dictate that these are presented as novel occurrences, detached from the context that produced them and largely unique to the present. In understanding mainstream media’s uncritical response to the US Patriot Act, which continues to this day, it is important to understand the abject cowardice of the industry as in large part an effect of the purge of broadcast industries that took place at the beginning of the Korean War, at a highly formative moment in television history when the routines and practices that would govern the industry for years to come were first established. Although lists of liberal writers, academics, trade unionists, government officials, and other “subversives” had been published as early as 1934 and similar lists were rumored to have circulated at CBS and other networks both during and after World War II, the television blacklist began in earnest on June 22, 1950, when a book called Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was published just three days before the North Korean Army crossed the 38th parallel.
The rightwing attacks on the broadcast industry that followed were part of a broader struggle over what it would mean to be “American,” in deeply raced and gendered terms. As social psychologist Marie Jahoda observed in her landmark essay on “Anticommunism and Employment Policies in Radio and Television” (1955), the federal loyalty and security programs did “not present a single isolated set of administrative measures to which people respond.” Instead, Jahoda understood the blacklists as “an integral part of a whole host of related activities” (1952: 329), as a field of thought and practical activity aimed at discouraging progressive political activity and encouraging a strict conformity of thought, particularly when it came to issues of race, class, gender, and Americanism. Jahoda’s observations provide an important framework for understanding the broadcast blacklist not as a temporary rift in the wider tapestry of US democracy, but as part of a longer standing and deeply institutionalized response to leftwing cultural production. In examining the anti-red networks that shaped the nascent television industry, the white supremacist ideologies they shared, and the strategies they used “to immediately undertake a suitable counter-attack” against the “Red Fascism” they believed were staging an ideological take-over of the airwaves (Red Channels: 5), this paper analyzes the broad institutional framework for the blacklist and the long term effects it was to have on the parameters of dissent.
Example 3: Panel Proposal (Accepted Console-ing Passions 2008)
Panel Proposal: “The Only Differences Between the Two Genders are Cosmetic”: Gender, Gaming, and World of Warcraft
Panel Rationale: Online gaming, particularly massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), have only recently become the objects of scholarly attention within media studies. Because new media technology and gaming in particular have traditionally been understood to be the province of boys and men, games have been designed with male players (especially those notorious early-adopters and beta testers) in mind. Much scholarship on games and gaming implicitly accepts these stereotypes about gender, games, and gamers, thereby minimizing or ignoring the role of gender in both game design and play. Only recently have female players been acknowledged as an important demographic for such games and feminist scholarship has only begun to detail how gender plays out during the persistent course of online games. This panel, organized around World of Warcraft (with 9 million players worldwide, WoW is the world’s most popular subscriber game) is part of this wider, emerging conversation about gender and gaming.
Abstracts:
Carol A. Stabile, “An Even Playing Field? Gender Neutrality in WoW”
The game manual for World of Warcraft instructs players that “Men and women are equal in Azeroth, so the only differences between the two genders are cosmetic.” WoW is fairly singular among MMORPGs insofar as its address to female players has tried to steer a middle course between ignoring female gamers altogether and creating gender-neutral game content. Gender, the game’s designers insist, does not affect one’s travels throughout Alliance or Horde territories, the ability to complete quests, to slay the monsters encountered during the course of the game, or to level up. The introduction of Blood Elves with the Burning Crusade expansion pack further emphasized this kind of post-gender mentality: the Blood Elves inhabit a world in which “conventional gender roles” have been set aside as a result of “the devastating casualties of the Third War.”
Where the other papers that make up this panel examine specific sites of gendered game activity (high-level groups organized and led by female gamers; the controversy over the introduction of Blood Elves, the phenomenon of “twinking”), this paper situates WoW within the literature on gender and gaming, providing an overview of the world WoW seeks to create, the role that gender plays in the process of world-building, and the key questions WoW raises for the study of gender and new media.
Sarah Mick, “Women in Charge: Female Guild Leaders in World of Warcraft”
“Why does everyone automatically assume I know tailoring and cooking?” quips the joke emote of the female human race in WoW. This self-consciousness about gender stereotypes run throughout the official language of WoW and the game designers argue that gender makes no difference in terms of game play. But joking aside, to what extent are traditional gender roles upheld in guilds and groups in the game world of Azeroth?
Both women and men routinely play characters of opposite gender in WoW, which has caused gaming scholars like T.L. Taylor to argue that gender really does not matter in MMORPGs. But the recent introduction of voice chat software, especially in high-end guilds and groups, may have changed all that. Once many players reach level 70, they begin to participate in groups of five or raids of ten or more players. Since these groups and raids require coordination and strategy with other players to complete complex obstacles, typing out the group strategies and commands can become burdensome. To form a more cohesive attempt at completing group tasks, players often use voice-chat software to communicate more effectively. Since this technology can reveal the actual gender of the person controlling the character, the question this paper seeks to address, through interviews with high-end guildies in particular, is the extent to which the introduction of this technology changes the game experience for female players, and whether this explains the relatively small number of females are guild and raid leaders. The aim of this project is to better understand why there are few female guild leaders and whether the guild experience has changed for female players because of the introduction of this software.
Sean Quast,”Twinks: Cross-dress for Success?”
Although scholars of WoW have argued that the game is built upon the ideas about cooperation rather than competition, the mini games known as Battlegrounds are openly based on militarized competition. In the Battlegrounds, the focus of WoW switches from player versus environment (PVE) to player versus player (PVP). Players compete to be the highest rank by racking up more kills and events.
Players more interested in this aspect of the game create specific characters that only compete in these mini games. This practice is called “twinking.” Twinking is a “follow-the-rules” style of what is known as grief gaming, in which players intentionally harm other players for their own enjoyment. In the case of twinking, seemingly low-level player characters are equipped with superior gear, thereby deceiving their opponents and allowing them to inflict maximum damage.
Since character selection does not affect the abilities of a character, this paper explores the reasons why the majority of such “twinked” players are female. Why do players choose female characters when playing as a “twink”? How are traditional stereotypes of gender used to escape being targets, invoke vulnerability, and humiliate competitors? The aim of this project is to better understand how, and despite the irrelevance of gender in other areas of gameplay, gender bending has become so popular in the aggressive area of grief gaming.
Mara Williams, “Mr. Horde Universe: Beauty, Superficiality and Femininity in WoW’s Male Blood Elves”
With the launch of The Burning Crusade, Blizzard expanded the World of Warcraft universe to include two new playable races. The Dranei were added to the ranks of the Alliance and the Blood Elves to the Horde. In World of Warcraft lore, the Blood Elves are a decadent, vain race, prone to addiction and with a “terrible thirst for magic.” Having “embrac[ed] demonic energies” in order to maintain their access to magic, the Blood Elves are morally ambiguous at best. Despite that, the Blood Elves have proved popular among game players. That is not to say the Blood Elves have not caused controversy. In fact, conversations on Blizzard-run forums reveal deep anxieties about the perceived masculinity of male Blood Elves. In the eyes of some, male Blood Elves are queer because, as one forum poster put it, “when you’re THAT pretty, it’s hard to be normal” (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2518013582&postId=24689998913&sid=1#4).
In the game itself, the male Blood Elf emotes, or pre-programmed animated gestures, confuse some gender stereotypes. The /silly and /flirt commands have gender and race specific animations and audio tracks. Those of the male Blood Elves emphasize physical beauty and superficiality. Moreover, some of the quotations encourage an ambiguous reading of their sexuality. Echoing the Pussycat Dolls song, male Blood Elves quip, “don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like me?” This quote emphasizes the Blood Elves’ vanity and simultaneously queers nearby male avatars by implying they desire the beautiful male Blood Elf.
Given Blizzard’s institutional investment in the masculinity of its avatars through the character redesign, it is interesting the Blood Elves are consistently seen as feminine by fans. So, how do players react to the Blood Elves? On the Blizzard forums, players joke about the implications of rolling a Blood Elf. One poster declared, “Playing a Blood elf turned me gay ;_;” (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=2518013582&postId=24689999315&sid=1#57). Playing an avatar of a different gender is accepted in the game. Why then is playing an avatar of a different sexual orientation (if one chooses to read the male Blood Elf that way) so problematic? This paper examines the hostile and derisive reactions to the perceived gayness of male Blood Elves by forum posters and the anxieties these reveal anxieties about masculinity and homosexuality.
Participant Bios:
Sarah Mick is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee where she is double majoring in Graphic Design and Advertising.
Sean Quast is an undergraduate in the Journalism and Mass Communication Department at University Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is an editor at the independent campus paper, the UWM Post, and a video game columnist.
Carol A. Stabile teaches Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix (1994), Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies (2000), Prime Time Animation (2003), and White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture (2006). She is currently writing a book on the effects of the blacklist in television on progressive women writers.
Mara Williams is a graduate student in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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