Here's my abstract for submission for the "Race and Video Games" conference at University of California, Riverside:
"Looking for Ophera Windfury: Imagining Race (and Sexuality) in World of Warcraft"
Given the incredible global popularity of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, with a playership now exceeding six million worldwide, there is still a dearth of scholarship on and cultural critique of the game, particularly looking at race and sexuality. This paper attempts to identify and interrogate the "racial logics" of WoW, beyond a close-reading of fantasy race as allusion or allegory for real world race, to begin to theorize how race is visualized, articulated, and cued. In other words, in a game of fantasy race, how and where and why might actual race and racism be deployed, negotiated, disguised, and taken for granted. Lisa Nakamura, author of Cybertypes, argues, "When users go online, race dwells in the mediating spaces between the virtual and the real, the visible and the invisible" (144). How then can we challenge and explore this mediating space? Furthermore, in the imagining (perhaps intrusion) of real world race into the game in ways that fix them or to borrow Nakamura's construction cybertype them, how might other categories, such as sexuality, be left unsettled or open? Looking at character creation, game play, and game narratives, this paper argues for a productive opportunity in the play of, with, and play in race and sexuality to discover "disruptive moments of recognization and misrecognition" (Nakamura 144) that can offer "subversive potential in regard to oppressive notions of racial [and sexual] identity" (146).
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2 comments:
sounds like an interesting paper, but i also thing it sounds a bit overly celebratory. I personally struggle with the overtly racist tropes that constantly play out in the WOW design. Look at the horde, particularly the way the trolls speak and the orcs dance--it is a fairly clear reference to Carribean People of Color. Obviously any sort of essentialising representations would be problematic, but when you consider the way in which the horde is framed as "primitive" then it seems particularly nasty. Don't get me wrong i still love the game, but I am also aware of the role that it plays in re-presenting cultural identities.
S
Oh, I totally agree. But this is exactly the kind of thing that needs to be unpacked and not totally written off as racist. That isn't productive, in my estimation. The paper deploys Bhabha's formulation of productive ambivalence and the ways that stereotypes can be interrupted. Plus, I think there needs to be opportunity to be celebratory in disciplines that often only materialize negative critique. It can be both.
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