Josh Rivers

Against the backdrop of a growing concern for the fate of critique in the current era, queer video games such as tranxiety, Dream Daddy and Gone Home have begun to engage players in the process of critically examining their own assumptions and immersing them in a performative critique, particularly as it relates to non-normative lived experiences. Alongside exploring whether these games are 'merely' the result of critical game design, such that players are enlisted to perform critique, or if queer play is more than a prescribed behavior, this article will utilize examples from across various video game platforms and genres to demonstrate that whether trying to survive daily life as a trans woman in the beginning stages of transition in tranxiety or exploring the dating life of Maple Bay's latest resident in Dream Daddy, queer video games serve as a platform through which players are encouraged to perform critique via queer play, that is to say, playing outside of traditi...

Since its first heel hit the runway, the Utrecht-based “Twerk It & Werk It” drag party has drawn heavily on RuPaul’s Drag Race for both inspiration and guidance. Utilizing ethnographic data from this Dutch underground drag event, this chapter traces the party from its nascence in March of 2013 to the most recent edition in September of 2017. In doing so, I highlight the indeterminate manner in which organizers and participants of Twerk It & Werk It sometimes engage with Drag Race as an exemplary model of what drag should be and other times reject it as an “overly commercialized and American” reality TV series.

First inspired by season five of Drag Race, the organizers of Twerk It & Werk It heralded the beginning of this underground party series as groundbreaking, citing its role in “making a place for drag in Utrecht” in the style of a “Drag Race party.” Charting the change in the party’s organization and its participants’ engagement, this chapter speaks to the manner in which the organizers and participants began their underground drag party series closely aligned with a singular vision of what makes a “fierce” drag performance as mediated by RuPaul before gradually shifting to a more subversive and playful drag ball in later editions that, although more open in its interpretation of drag, nevertheless continued to draw on Drag Race’s own shifting portrayal of drag to shape the party’s rules of engagement.

Drag performers the world over face audiences informed by “post Drag Race” standards and conceptualizations of what it means to be a drag queen in their once niche and somewhat parochial performances. Alongside the growing appreciation for drag that RuPaul kindles, there exists a problematically narrow popular definition of drag. This chapter draws on ethnographic data from Twerk It & Werk It to analyze the nexus of expanding drag audience and contracting definition of drag as an intersection of commercialization and colonization made manifest through RuPaul’s Drag Race’s widespread popularity.

Far from a single-sided tale painting the show and its impacts as a story of Ru’s malevolent empire, I draw on the empirical example of Twerk It & Werk It to broaden our understanding of the contingent manner in which local drag subcultures both draw on and reject Drag Race’s particular portrayal and conceptualization of drag performance. Through a detailed analysis of Twerk It and Werk It’s own indeterminate relationship with Drag Race ideals during its shift into a drag party that embraces and lauds “fierce” drag alongside more subversive genderqueer performances, this chapter sheds light on the particulars of Drag Race’s impact on local drag cultures. In addition, I highlight the importance of eschewing both willful naïveté and unbridled critique when speaking to the complex manner in which Drag Race has irrevocably altered contemporary drag scenes whether within the United States or abroad.

Against the backdrop of a growing concern for the fate of critique in the current era, queer video games such as tranxiety, Dream Daddy and Gone Home have begun to engage players in the process of critically examining their own assumptions and immersing them in a performative critique, particularly as it relates to non-normative lived experiences. Alongside exploring whether these games are ‘merely’ the result of critical game design, such that players are enlisted to perform critique, or if queer play is more than a prescribed behavior, this article will utilize examples from across various video game platforms and genres to demonstrate that whether trying to survive daily life as a trans woman in the beginning stages of transition in tranxiety or exploring the dating life of Maple Bay’s latest resident in Dream Daddy, queer video games serve as a platform through which players are encouraged to perform critique via queer play, that is to say, playing outside of traditional video game and character norms. Embracing a productive nexus of critical reflection and performativity, queer video games demonstrate that critique is well served by participatory media. Critique has entered the digital era and, though transformed, it is alive and well.

Against the backdrop of the debate surrounding their work as subversion of heternormativity or mere entertainment, drag queens the world over are engaged in the quotidian negotiation of boundaries between what Lambek terms the continuous person, their “boy selves,” and the discontinuous act of performing their drag personas. Within the rich discourse connecting drag queens and performance theory, there is often an unacknowledged binarism-based boundary wedged between drag persona and artist. Drawing on ethnographic data from the Dutch underground drag party series, TwerK It & Werk It, this paper suggests using Lambek’s concepts of the continuous and discontinuous in concert with M’Charek’s notion of the crumpled object to better understand how drag queens eschew traditional boundaries of their continuous boy selves and embrace the discontinuous act of crafting a drag persona that then becomes her own continuous and crumpled person. In stark contrast to a dialogue that emphasizes a distance between continuous and discontinuous performativities, this paper demonstrates how drag queens exemplify a queering of the boundary between stable temporal selves and the discontinuous act of performing drag. In highlighting the quintessentially queer manner in which a group of Dutch drag queens negotiate their drag identities, this paper addresses the false binaries of performance theorists such as Butler who speak to drag queens as somehow apart from their creators. This, in turn, will demonstrate how a synthesis of Lambek and M’Charek’s concepts aids in providing nuanced and non-binary language with which to discuss the complexities of queer performativities.

Blurring the lines between human and machine, actual and virtual, residents of virtual worlds engage in myriad cyborgian behaviors, particularly with regards to sexuality. Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork in the massively multiplayer game of Final Fantasy XIV, this paper will build on Haraway’s notion of the cyborg by proposing and arguing for a new understanding of embodiment in the digital era: cyborg embodiment. Situated between the actual and virtual, but not entirely rooted in either realm, cyborg embodiment is a sense of self that reaches beyond the physical realm and into the ones and zeros of servers around the world. With a particular focus on erotic roleplay, the act of roleplaying sex between two or more player-controlled avatars either through written text or in-game actions, this paper demonstrates that cyborg embodiment is an inherent aspect of playing massively multiplayer online games and accordingly of residing in a virtual world. Through erotic roleplay, players shed binaries such as male or female and actual or virtual, instead embracing a queer notion of sexuality situated simultaneously in the code of virtual worlds and in the players’ corporeal locations. By exploring novel forms of sexuality such as erotic roleplay, sexuality studies stands to gain a deeper of understanding of both digital forms of sexuality and the ways in which increasingly popular virtual worlds impact our corporeal selves.