We’re delighted to announce the lecture “Queer and Mad Readings in Video Game Studies” by Cecilia Rodéhn and Marie Dalby! This event is the next in our series Transforming Games: Behavior, Identity, Culture, and Community (TAG), a research network funded by the Centre for Integrated Research on Culture and Society (CIRCUS) at Uppsala University. The network connects researchers from Game Design, Gender Studies, and Psychology in a joint research agenda focusing on the impacts of society on games and vice versa.
When: Tuesday, October 1, 7-8:30pm CEST
Register here: https://tinyurl.com/5f97chdz
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Description:
In this talk, Cecilia Rodéhn will discuss mad reading: a mad studies centred method for analysing games. Mad studies is an interdisciplinary field that critically discusses how the social and medical systems create mental illness. Rodéhn will explore mad reading as (1) a situated reading, (2) challenging sanist representations, (3) reading the explicitly mad, (4) revealing where madness is not clearly visible, and (5) maddening games. As a method, it seeks to illuminate sanist representations, but it also has a more utopian and empowering agenda.
Marie Dalby will discuss Dark Souls (2011), a genre-defying video game that has achieved an almost mythical status and is synonymous for difficulty. For the uninitiated, Dark Souls might appear as an odd choice to put in conversation with queer theory. In this talk, Dalby will not investigate representations of queer subjects or queer modes of play; instead, she will employ a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective to explore what happens to queer readings of games when we abandon identification and look to desire.
Presenters bio:
Cecilia Rodéhn is an associate professor and a senior lecturer at the Centre for Gender Research and Department of Game Design, Uppsala University. Her research focuses on representations of madness and psychiatric hospitals.
Marie Dalby is a Ph.D. student at the Centre for Gender Research and Department of Game Design, Uppsala University. Her research explores the video game Dark Souls (2011) from a queer theory perspective.
This series is hosted by the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. The series explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Learn more about the Games and Society Lab at Uppsala: https://www.speldesign.uu.se/research/games-and-society-lab/
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