I am so totally in love with the original art that artist (and UCI PhD candidate) Kat Brewster created for the cover of my new book Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies. It’s done in the style of an antique scientific illustration, with a mix of nautical items and sex toys. It really captures the spirit of the project, which is about the stories we tell about the origins of contemporary sex tech and how interrogating the history of the sex doll also gives us a way to interrogate our cultural beliefs about sex and tech.

Sex Dolls at Sea is scheduled to come out this spring – spring 2022 – from MIT Press, so keep an eye out for more updates!

It’s official! The edited volume that Johanna Brewer, Amanda Cullen, and Christopher Persaud have been hard at work on over the last year – tentatively titled Live Streaming Culture – is now under contract with MIT Press. The volume includes an introduction from us editors, a foreword from the fabulous T. L. Taylor, and a collection of 20 amazing original articles about the ways that live streaming has shaped culture and culture has shaped live streaming. We’re aiming for a spring 2023 publication so keep your eyes out for this one!

Rainforest Scully-Blaker and I have a new article that just came out in the International Journal of Cultural Studies – “Making Players Care: The Ambivalent Cultural Politics of Care and Video Games.” It’s about the messy relationship between care and games, which simultaneously has the feminist potential to make video games more inclusive and the problematic potential to promote exploitation of game workers and marginalized people. Here’s the abstract:

The relationship between care and video games is fraught. While the medium has the potential to allow players to meaningfully express and receive care, the cultural rhetorics that connect video games to care are often problematic. Even among game designers and scholars committed to social justice, some view care with hope and others with concern. Here, we identify and unpack these tensions, which we refer to as the ambivalent cultural politics of care, and illustrate them through three case studies. First, we discuss “tend-and-befriend games,” coined by Brie Code, which we read through feminist theorists Sarah Sharma and Sara Ahmed. Second, we address “empathy games” and the worrisome implication that games by marginalized people must make privileged players care. Lastly, we turn to issues of care in video game development. We discuss Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead series (2012–18) and strikingly care-less fan responses to recent employee layoffs.

If you don’t have institutional access to the article, you can view it here. Thanks for reading!

I’m excited to announce that I have officially been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in UCI’s Department of Film and Media Studies! It’s such a wonderful and surreal feeling, and I absolutely could not have gotten here without my many, many mentors and collaborators. Thank you to everyone!

My plan now is to take some time this summer to reflect on life after tenure and think about what comes next. What do I want to write? How do I want to contribute to my community? Now that I have job secure, can I start wearing overalls to academic meetings? It’s time for the big questions…

Very cool news! My book The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games, which came out last year from Duke University Press, has won the annual Israel Fishman Award for an outstanding work of LGBT non-fiction. It’s one of the Stonewall Book Awards given out by the American Library Association, and it’s a big deal because it means that the book (and the work of the amazing queer and trans creators who are featured in it) is reaching a mainstream readership.

It’s an honor. Now I’m just hoping for one of those cool foil stickers on the front cover of the book. Thanks to everyone who participated in this project and helped make it a success!

Dan Lark and I have a new article that just came out from Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. It’s called “Live Streaming from the Bedroom: Performing Intimacy through Domestic Space on Twitch” and it’s about streamers broadcasting from their homes and what that says about gender and sexuality in live streaming. Here’s the abstract:

This article looks at the appearance of domestic spaces on the popular livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, with a focus on livestreams that appear to be shot in streamers’ bedrooms. Many Twitch streamers broadcast from their homes, making domestic space central to questions of placemaking for this rapidly growing digital media form. Within the home, bedrooms merit particular attention because they carry particular cultural connotations; they are associated with intimacy, embodiment, and erotics. Drawing from observations of gaming and nongaming streams, we map where bedrooms do and do not appear on Twitch. We locate the majority of bedrooms in categories that foreground connections between streamers and viewers, like Just Chatting, Music & Performing Arts, and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). By contrast, across a wide range of video game genres, bedrooms remain largely absent from gaming streams. The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.

For folks without institutional access, check out this link to view the article.

Teaching this spring quarter (with the rapid transition to online learning) has been tricky all around. For me, it’s meant looking for online resources that I might not have used for an in-person class, like “guest lectures” – recorded videos of fellow scholars presenting work in accessible, enjoyable ways that click with students at a distance. If you’re looking for more prerecorded talks for your fall courses, here’s one I think turned out really nicely:

Back in fall 2019, I had the opportunity to give a talk for my book, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019), at the NYU Game Center as part of their featured lecture series. The recording is up on YouTube, and includes a fun intro and Q&A led by Robert Yang.

My new book, The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games, is out now! You can order it through Duke University Press or Amazon. It’s a really great collection of interviews with queer and trans indie game makers that explores the politics, aesthetics, and artistic inspirations behind the current wave of queer video games.

Sadly, because of COVID-19, the official book launch – which was going to be an awesome social justice games studies book release party at SCMS 2020 – had to be cancelled. But the book is out there and ready to be read, reviewed, and enjoyed! Once things settle down a bit in the fall, I’ll be out spreading the word.

I’m so, so excited to announce that, as of the start of this calendar year, I’m in a new position. I’m now an assistant professor in the UC Irvine’s Department of Film and Media Studies, which is part of the School of Humanities. I’m extremely grateful for all of the colleagues and administrators who help with my transfer from the Department of Informatics, where I’ve been working for the past few years, to my new department. I couldn’t be happier to be returning to the humanities.

Another piece of related good news: I’ll be keeping an association with Informatics as an affiliate faculty member, which means I can keep advising and mentoring the amazing Informatics PhD students, including those in the CATS (Critical Approaches to Technology and the Social) research lab that my colleagues Aaron Trammell and I co-run. It’s the best of both worlds.

Thank you to everyone who offered their assistance and support as I’ve made the transition!

It’s been nearly a year and a half in the making, but it’s now officially published: the Oxford Bibliography of Feminist and Queer Game Studies.

This is a massive — and hopefully massively useful! — resource, with overviews in fifteen sub-areas and 150 citations, each with a description of the text. The bibliography is a collaboration of Adrienne Shaw (our first author and fearless leader), Alexandra Agloro, Josef Nguyen, Amanda Phillips, and myself. It’s peer-reviewed just like a journal article would be. Quite an undertaking.

The bibliography is a living document, so we can come back and make additions. It was also surprisingly hard to limit ourselves to 150 citations. There is so much great work out there that brings feminist and queer perspectives to game studies. We built the list in early 2018, so there’s some newer work that slipped by, but feel free to check out my queer game studies reading list for a supplemental list.

Here are some of the subject areas we cover in the bibliography:

– Feminist Theory & Games
– Queer Theory & Games
– Critical Race Theory & Games
– Game Design
– Platform Studies
– Transmedia
– Feminist Ethnography
– Player Practices
– Performance
– Sex & Sexuality
– Gendered Play
– Harassment & Toxic Gaming Cultures