Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games, Gaspard Pelurson (Review)
Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games
Gaspard Pelurson
London: Routledge, 2022
ISBN: 9780367900649
Manifestations of Queerness in Video Games positions video games alongside queer fixtures, such as drag, cyborgs, sissies, flânerie, monsters, and the latent homoeroticism of wrestling. Together with Bonnie Ruberg’s (2019) Video Games Have Always Been Queer, Gaspard Pelurson’s monograph serves to become a foundational text in the now flourishing discourse of queer game studies. Video games are typically understood through mastery, competition, capital, and production; however, through queer thinking, they become sites of hope, failure, fragility, and erotics. Where Ruberg proves there is queerness in every game and every game can be queered, Pelurson presents queer manifestations, how you might find them, and how subversive, disruptive, and arousing they can be should you catch a glimpse.
On his methodology, Pelurson is extensive in his queer theoretical approaches. From the affects of Sara Ahmed to the failure of Jack Halberstam, the death drive of Lee Edelman to the futurity of José Esteban Muñoz – all are required to locate queer manifestations. Ruberg’s approach often centres queerness as connotation, relying on D.A. Miller’s (1990) reading of a text ‘too-close’ to enter its shadowy realm of connotation (where queerness often reigns). Pelurson’s work enjoys similar readings, though more often locates queerness where it is evident, only covert. He finds queer arts and acts that have been otherwise hard to catch while moving beyond video games proper to consider gaming cultures and dissident play practices where memes, YouTube videos, and fan content actively hijack and modify gamescapes.
For this review, I am going to look at Chapters One [‘Sporting Moustaches, Riding Bulls, Flashing Bums – Dorian Pavus’s Queer Odyssey’], Three [‘‘Gotta Smuggle Them All!’ – Queer Détournement, Drag, and Border Politics’], and Five [‘Flawless in Defeat – In and For the Margins’].
Chapter One returns to Dragon Age: Inquisition’s (BioWare 2014) seeming gay stereotype, Dorian Pavis, finding, on closer inspection, queerness in his interspecies sex and relationship. Pavus is a sassy and camp mage, a moustachioed dandy on the battlefield. However, he was initially met with some condemnation from many in the LGBTQ+ community, who were already tired of such stereotypical attributes. Pelurson recognises this and the perils of representation where easily signified tropes work to cement often inaccurate identities. Although, in this chapter, Pelurson is more concerned with the queer relationship between Pavus and Iron Bull – a Qunari. Being a Qunari, Iron Bull is much larger than humans and has metallic skin and horns. He is a romance option for either male or female player-characters, and should the player not romance either Pavus or Iron Bull; the two will form an interspecies relationship.
According to Pelurson, interspecies couplings transgress many preconstructed understandings of the social, sexual, and political, the intricacies and pragmatics of which the player can learn. Though their relationship is only afforded a few details, should the player (in another save) romance Iron Bull, they will discover from the Qunari that it takes great fortitude and grit to ‘ride the bull’. Iron Bull’s words imply that his penis size or force is incommensurate to the human body. As Pelurson writes, ‘Human-Qunari sex is, therefore, presented both as a physically and psychologically demanding practice and uncharted territory to the player’ (14). Despite this, the encounter between Pavus and Iron Bull goes smoothly, and the next day Dorian is ready to enter the battlefield once more, his typical flamboyant self. Pelurson holds that these sex acts require the human to take in all the queerness of the situation both figuratively and literally, to become a body in excess. It is a task that Pavus readily takes up.
Pelurson next turns to fanfiction and content created around ‘Adoribull’, the slash ship between Pavus and Iron Bull. Despite their queer acts, he finds that many fans enshrine heteronormativity in their work. Pavus, the more effeminate of the two, is often posed in the submissive role during sex and sometimes impregnated by the dominant and more masculine Iron Bull. Throughout this work, Pelurson understands queerness as ‘effervescent’, that is, exuberant yet unstable and fleeting. Here, queerness springs up in the excesses of Pavus and Iron Bull to then fizzle out and return to heteronormativity in these fanfictions.
Chapter Three finds queerness manifesting in drag and memes that hijack the green and pleasant world of Pokémon: Sword and Shield (Game Freak 2019) to parody political events. The Galar region, which hosts this Pokémon instalment, is a whitewashed version of the United Kingdom, complete with sheep, rolling hills, thatched cottages, punks, red bricks, and a ‘noticeable lack of trees’ (53). Often recognisable and easily modellable, Pokémon and their world are ripe canvases for hijacking. Pelurson discusses how, through silliness and detournement, characters are propelled into figures of activism in a world devoid of problems that cannot be solved through Pokémon battles. This chapter considers the ‘Dexit’ controversy, which references P:SS’s dramatic reduction of Pokémon in the game, excluding 400 creatures from the Galar Region. ‘Dexit’ is a portmanteau of Pokédex (an in-game encyclopaedia of Pokémon) and exit, and, of course, a nod toward Brexit and the United Kingdom’s own border policing.
From the controversy, memes emerge that draw a version of Galar with strict borders where Pokémon not within the region’s Pokédex are refused entry. These ‘Galar border memes’ feature those excluded Pokémon disguising themselves as locally registered ones to try and enter the country. Pelurson understands these memes as a form of species-bending ‘drag’ that inhabits cultural and political codes to subvert and critique with humour. As he writes, the memes gently mock the ‘saccharine and sterile presentation of Galar’ (55) and, simultaneously, mock the patriotism that fuels the U.K.’s decision to leave the EU, offering a more realistic picture. Here, drag and Pokémon memes expose political codes and national stereotypes, offering realism, ironically, through their radical silliness.
Chapter Five examines the fragile subcultural territories of Gyaku Ryona YouTube videos. Such videos typically feature characters from fighting games enacting one-sided matches where one of the characters overpowers the other, placing them in holds and knocking them to the floor. As Pelurson writes: ‘The muscled characters give a performance that is rigid and clumsy, showcasing bodies that are both unbreakable and worthless, puzzling mainstream gamers yet clearly arousing others’ (87). Gyaku Ryona is a deviant play practice that abandons the conventions of fighting games: namely, skill, competition, spectacle, and even playing the video game itself, as these videos exist on YouTube. Pelurson draws on Jack Halberstam’s (2011) notion of queer failure that promises to disrupt, shock, and make a mess; to eschew success, which is tied to advancement, capital, family, and ethical conduct. According to Pelurson, in embracing failure, Gyaku Ryona rejects ‘the culture which enables fighting games to thrive, but also epitomise a queer dynamic between the two characters, performing alternative forms of fun’ (94).
Gyaku Ryona perverts fighting games, rendering them an erotic experience by transgressing the core values of fighting game culture. At the same time, as a fetishism, it flushes out the latent homoeroticism intrinsic to wrestling. Indeed, Pelurson cites Gregory Woods (1987) and Brian Pronger (1990), who regard fighting sports as an ‘acceptable form of gay foreplay for straight people and fighters as erotic accomplices in an arena where women are absent or relegated to decorative roles’ (97). Queerness, again, rests in the effervescence of Gyaku Ryona. With many videos isolated to YouTube channels and Twitter accounts, relying on the free labour of a few queer individuals, these videos are likely to be lost as accounts are abandoned, deleted, or removed. Pelurson notes how one such YouTube account – GyakuRyonaMale – has been shut down due to alleged ‘nudity’, rendering his references obsolete. This issue has plagued many queer researchers whose materials are often not, or improperly, archived (Ford 2023). As José Esteban Muñoz argues, because queerness is often transmitted covertly, existing as ‘innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments’, ephemera must stand for evidence (1996: 6). Like Muñoz, Pelurson finds queerness in this fragility, for him queerness is effervescence; it ‘sparkles, then disappears’ (110).
Through interspecies couplings, silliness, failure, and ephemera, Pelurson finds queerness precipitating in myriad ways, all working to subvert and disrupt video games, play, and politics. His work highlights video games as a polysemous medium, requiring combined knowledge practices to recognise and reflect on these experiences of deviant and dissident play. Like many queer works, a piece of himself pervades this work and his ongoing sentiment that video games and play can, if only for a moment, be radical, queer, and revolutionary.
References:
Ford, Sarah-Joy (2023). ‘Quilting Intergenerational Intimacies in Fisch’s Rebel Dykes Archive.’ In Daniel Fountain (ed.), Crafted with Pride: Queer Craft and Activism in Contemporary Britain. Bristol: Intellect Books.
Halberstam, Jack (2011). The Queer Art of Failure. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Muñoz, José Esteban (1996). ‘Ephemera as Evidence: Introductory Notes to Queer Acts.’ Women & Performance: Journal of Feminist Theory 8, no. 2: 5-16.
Ruberg, Bonnie (2019). Video Games Have Always Been Queer. New York: New York University Press.