Hot gaming: a queer eye on World of Warcraft April 29, 2009

This seminar from the University's Informatics Research Institute will be presented by Dr Jenny Sunden from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm.

Profile:
Jenny Sundén is Assistant Professor at the Department of Media Technology, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. Her research interests are primarily in new media studies, queer/feminist theory, and games. She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment, and co-editor of Cyberfeminism in Northern Lights: Gender and Digital Media in a Nordic Context and Second Nature: Origins and Originality in Art, Science and New Media.

Abstract:
Part reading, part lecture, this is an exploration in the intersections of queer theory, queer lives and the study of online games.

It explores notions of emotion, closeness and queer desire in new media ethnography by using an ongoing study of the MMOG (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) World of Warcraft.

As opposed to the kind of fieldwork where being, living, and staying in the field is the only option, new media ethnography brings with it the possibility of moving through different locations and bodies to the point where the borders between them may start to blur. The text positions itself within this very uncertainty to investigate its consequences for ways of knowing online game cultures.

Drawing on autoethnography, as well as the body of ethnographic work interrogating erotic subjectivity and desire in the field, the discussion makes use of personal experiences - in particular an in-game as well as out-of-the game love affair - as (in)valuable sources of knowledge.

Within this work, it has not been very clear which body it is more precisely that is acting and reacting, moving and feeling (of protein or of silicon?), or how these multiple bodies are imbricated in or relate to one another. Was it her, regardless of the game? Was it her through the game? Or was it the game itself?

Official Website: http://www.salford.ac.uk/events/details/916