The New Imitation Game

Screen Bodies ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-95
Author(s):  
Carlos Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Test Subject ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Imitation Game ◽  
Starting Point

Taking as its starting point the “original” variant of Alan Turing’s famous “imitation game” (in which a test subject attempts to differentiate, based purely on textual output, between a man and a woman), this article considers the ways in which gender and sexuality are simulated in the contemporary genre of virtual romance or dating video games. The article focuses on three Sinitic games, each of which strategically queers this predominantly heteronormative genre. In queering desire, moreover, these Sinitic games simultaneously suggest ways in which Chinese society itself may also be strategically queered.

Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

2016 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-551
Author(s):  
Jacqui Miller
Keyword(s):  
Identity Formation ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Liberal Politics ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Opening Up

Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies, but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neo-liberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film's perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society's wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film's subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film's opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character.

Famiglia, sessualitŕ, riproduzione: un puzzle da ricomporre

2009 ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Stefania Bernini
Keyword(s):  
Family History ◽  
Gender Studies ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Fruitful Cooperation ◽  
The Relationship

- Family, Sexuality, Reproduction: an Unsolved Puzzle discusses the relationship between family history, gender studies and the studies of sexualities. Its starting point is the consideration that, perhaps surprisingly, disciplines and research interests apparently close have struggled to find a common language and a fruitful cooperation. Moving from a perspective of family history, this article explores causes and consequences of this apparent difficulty in finding a common ground between scholars of family, gender and sexuality and the possibility of overcoming it.Keywords: Family, Sexuality, Reproduction, Gender studies, Historiography, History.Parole chiave: Famiglia, Sessualitŕ, Riproduzione, Studi di genere, Storiografia, Storia.

Untranslatable wounds

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 538-548
Author(s):  
María Amelia Viteri
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Language Practices ◽  
Alternative Strategies ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Good Starting Point ◽  
Racial Ethnic

A good starting point for revisiting the intersections of language, gender and sexuality is to acknowledge and understand how colonial wounds and legacies play out in our everyday lives. This essay critically addresses the multiple ways in which we are all marked in one way or another by our colonial relations and their intersections. A careful unpacking of mechanisms and linkages is critical for identifying strategies and tactics of struggle that might lead to more equitable present-days characterised by esperanza (hope). Yet a desire to decolonise language and language practices without recognising the lived experience of our own messy and colonial entanglements will never be enough to resignify the systems that hold racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and linguistic inequalities in place. This essay highlights the acts of desbordar (undoing/overflowing), trasto-car (queering) and resentir (feeling again) as alternative strategies that can be used to fracture the architectures of colonialism, starting with our own.

scholarly journals The Dynamics of Eros: Teenagers and Socialization to Sexuality in Italian Atypical Families

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 200
Author(s):  
Francesco Iovine ◽  
Giuseppe Masullo
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Adopted Children ◽  
Educational Strategies ◽  
Internal Dynamics ◽  
Specific Mode ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Family Types ◽  
Children’S Sexuality ◽  
Depth Interviews

This paper aims at analysing the ways in which parents / adults and natural and adopted children, within nuclear and atypical families communicate and operate modes, dynamics, and experiences related to teenagers' intimate sphere. To this aim, our analysis identifies the different variables at play and their interrelation in defining the various modalities employed in different family types. The transition from the patriarchal to the “emotional” family has caused important changes related not only to the family's internal dynamics, but also to the autonomy of its individual members, particularly with regard to the sexual sphere. The starting point is a specific reflection on the sexuality of adolescents who, as we try to prove through the literature review, in this era is open to new forms of empowerment and emancipation that cause parents'/adults' educational strategies and models to be rethought. We pay particular attention to the rules by which the children's sexuality is managed in atypical families – particularly disrupted and / or recombined ones – in which it is possible to observe, as shown by in-depth interviews to parents, specific mode that escape any efforts of categorisation and cast new light on the dynamics underlying the socialisation of gender and sexuality in contemporary families.

Gender, Power, and the Gamic Gaze

Gamer Trouble ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 99-136
Author(s):  
Amanda Phillips
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Test Subject ◽  
The Other ◽  
Male Gaze ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Scientific Experiment ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
Patriarchal Power ◽  
Brown Body ◽  
Representations Of Women

This chapter argues that the interpretation of games like Bayonetta, Portal, and Tomb Raider rests on an implementation of the theory of the male gaze that isolates visuality from a greater context of computation, procedure, race, and history. It challenges the prevailing interpretations of Chell as “good” and Bayonetta as “bad” representations of women in video games. First, it situates the struggle between Chell and GLaDOS as an antifeminist one in which the player uses the power of the gaze, located in Chell’s voiceless brown body, to subdue the powerful bodiless voice of GLaDOS. This reduces Chell, a brown woman who is the test subject of a scientific experiment, to an instrument of patriarchy. On the other hand, Bayonetta, who is widely criticized as a hypersexual fantasy figure, performs what micha cárdenas calls queer femme disturbance, an excessive performance of femininity that disrupts heteronormative and patriarchal power. These two women offer more context to the case of Lara Croft, who has become more violent and less sexy over the years, and who has ascended to the position of brutal white colonizer while courting a feminist audience.

scholarly journals Design Principles for Serious Video Games in Mathematics Education: From Theory to Practice

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantinos Chorianopoulos ◽  
Michail Giannakos
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Learning Styles ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Game Design ◽  
Design Principles ◽  
Diverse Learning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Video Game Design ◽  
Evaluation Of Learning ◽  
Serious Video Games

There is growing interest in the employment of serious video games in science education, but there are no clear design principles. After surveying previous work in serious video game design, we highlighted the following design principles: 1) engage the students with narrative (hero, story), 2) employ familiar gameplay mechanics from popular video games, 3) engage students into constructive trial and error game-play and 4) situate collaborative learning. As illustrated examples we designed two math video games targeted to primary education students. The gameplay of the math video games embeds addition operations in a seamless way, which has been inspired by that of classic platform games. In this way, the students are adding numbers as part of popular gameplay mechanics and as a means to reach the video game objective, rather than as an end in itself. The employment of well-defined principles in the design of math video games should facilitate the evaluation of learning effectiveness by researchers. Moreover, educators can deploy alternative versions of the games in order to engage students with diverse learning styles. For example, some students might be motived and benefited by narrative, while others by collaboration, because it is unlikely that one type of serious video game might fit all learning styles. The proposed principles are not meant to be an exhaustive list, but a starting point for extending the list and applying them in other cases of serious video games beyond mathematics and learning.

scholarly journals Estudiantes universitarios y videojuegos: Cultura del medio percibida, uso y preferencias en función del género

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Jorge Oceja ◽  
Natalia González-Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Cross Sectional Survey ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Cultural Products ◽  
Gender Inequity ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Estudiantes Universitarios

This work analyses the video game culture in terms of perceptions, use, and preferences towards video games for a group of 610 university students, focusing on the impact of gender. The study is quantitative in nature, based on a cross-sectional survey and the subsequent statistical analysis of the data. Results show that students at this stage of life play video games and that they have – to a discernible degree – a video game culture, even though differences exist between men and women. Explanations for these differences, which affect other aspects like the platforms they use and their favourite games, are explored in the final part of the article. It seems that, besides their possibilities as an emergent media, video games are cultural products permeable and embedded in a context of gender inequity. This work aims to be a starting point for designing educational projects and policies that use video games in higher education while taking advantage of the diversity that this media can offer.

scholarly journals Ghosts of the Present Past: Spectrality in the Video Game Object

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Janik
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
The Past ◽  
Game World ◽  
Digital Materiality ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Dual Status ◽  
Game Environment ◽  
Game Environments

The aim of the article is to analyse the phenomenon of ghost characters in video games from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s concept of hauntology, and to use this as the starting point for a hauntological engagement with the video game object’srelationship with its own past. The paper will investigateghostly figuresand their spectral status inside the video game environment, as well as their uncertain hauntological status as both fictional bygone souls and digital in-game objects.On the basis of this analysis of ghostly figures in video game environments, I draw a line between the past of the fictional world and the past of the game world, and examine what happens when they overlap.The dual status of the in-game ghost will thereby serve to metonymically anchor an investi-gation into the duality of the game as a whole, as both fiction and digital materiality, and of the dif-ferent dimensions of the past that exist in between these two levels of the game object.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FORMS OF SHANDONG PROVINCE'S STONE RELIEFS COMPOSITION OF THE HAN ERA

2021 ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Zhicheng Bi ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Image Transmission ◽  
Han Dynasty ◽  
Shandong Province ◽  
Chinese Society ◽  
Funerary Art ◽  
Western Han Dynasty ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
The One ◽  
Two Stages

The stone reliefs of the Han era (206 BC – 220 AD) are a special type of funerary art with its own specific set of plots and art forms. Shandong Province takes the first place in China in terms of number of founding relief images. The peculiarity of the compositional construction of the Han's reliefs is that it isn’t based on the spatial principle of image transmission, but on the plastic-planar pictorial principle of a two-dimensional composition, which, with its thoughtful use, can carry the maximum emotional charge [Moshkov, Kuznetsov 1994]. Based on that, author’s own typology of the compositions of Han reliefs was built. Article the object of the study are stone reliefs of the Han Dynasty, Shandong Province, represented on stone sarcophagi, in stone tombs, temples of ancestors and steles, and passed the past two stages of its heyday. The purpose and objective of the study is to identify and study the laws of evolution of the composition of the stone reliefs of the Han Dynasty, Shandong Province, based on V.M. Moshkova’s principles of composition, using systemic and iconological research methods. Images on the stone reliefs of the Han tombs are distinguished by the peculiarity of the forms of compositional constructions, the process of development and evolution of which occurs in accordance with certain laws. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the starting point for the development of relief compositions of stone sarcophagi were two forms – symmetrical and nested (including several levels following the outlines and forms of stone material), which during the heyday of the Western Han Dynasty supplemented the “V”-shaped composition. Their further development is associated with the use of dispersed, zoned, irregular composition techniques, which spread around in turn of the CE. At the same time, a variety of compositional forms is also observed in the reliefs of tombs, temples of ancestors and stelae, in the reliefs of which during the period of the Eastern Han (25–220 CE) many different forms of compositional organization appear: for example, asymmetric, segmented, shingles wrong etc. The composition of combinations of geometric shapes, consisting, as a rule, of squares and circles, is also distributed. A variety of compositional forms is associated, on the one hand, with the complication of the architecture of burial structures and an increase in their scale. On the other hand, with the enrichment of the content and plots of reliefs, which is becoming more diverse and includes not only the image of Confucian’s symbols, but also narratives that reflect episodes from the lives of those buried. This indicates not only the process of improving art forms during the Han era, but also reflects a certain evolution of religious and philosophical thought, changes that took place in this period in the social structure of ancient Chinese society, and also, possibly, some external influences on the development of Chinese art.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document