Not Playing Around: Feminist and Queer Rhetorics in Videogames

NOT PLAYING AROUND: FEMINIST AND QUEER RHETORICS IN VIDEOGAMES examines how videogames function rhetorically to have material, affective, and embodied consequences. Rebecca S. Richards argues that playing videogames has a resistant rhetorical impact equivalent to other rhetorical acts such as giving a speech or writing a letter. Building upon extant videogame scholarship, Richards shows how these artifacts are urgent exigencies about gender and sexuality, presenting the audience with opportunities to practice rhetorical listening and silence, engage strategic contemplation, stealth transnational surveillance, and model disorientation and failure in a white supremacist, patriarchal capitalistic world. By default, videogames are forcibly transnational texts-texts that are created and circulate inside and across nation-state boundaries, which make them compelling sites for investigating how gender and sexuality are national social constructs with global implications.NOT PLAYING AROUND bui