As an academic accompany of an original artwork, In the Margins Overlooked No More discovers the themes of gender, race and disability bias in the mainstream world of art.
Interactive narratives-such as story-driven, choice-based video games-provide a space for playing with tropes and genre. Players are invited to collaborate in the creation of these stories, and can thus exercise their agency to interact... more
Interactive narratives-such as story-driven, choice-based video games-provide a space for playing with tropes and genre. Players are invited to collaborate in the creation of these stories, and can thus exercise their agency to interact with and subvert, harmful tropes and genre conventions. Here I specifically explore the use-and potential subversion-of problematic conventions regarding character death, such as the conflation of queerness and tragedy commonly known as 'Bury Your Gays' as explored in Life is Strange (DontNod 2015), and Carol J. Clover's concept of 'The Final Girl' in the horror genre as explored in Until Dawn (Supermassive 2015). BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Alex Henderson is a PhD candidate at the University of Canberra. Her creative thesis explores the ways that writers can play with familiar tropes and archetypes for the purpose of social commentary and diverse narratives, with particular focus on depictions of gender roles and the representation of LGBTQIA+ characters.
Chanady, T. (2018), « Renouveau des narratifs de l’homosexualité féminine à la télévision populaire : Une analyse queer et intersectionnelle des séries américaines Orange is the New Black et Transparent», dans Julie Beaulieu, Adrien... more
Chanady, T. (2018), « Renouveau des narratifs de l’homosexualité féminine à la télévision populaire : Une analyse queer et intersectionnelle des séries américaines Orange is the New Black et Transparent», dans Julie Beaulieu, Adrien Rannaud et Lori St-Martin (Eds), Génération(s) au féminin et nouvelles perspectives féministes, Éditions Codicille.
This article explores the mechanisms of fans self-regulation in conflict situations with the showrunners. Conflict situations are encouraged by the unfair treatment that LGBTQ characters receive in TV series, including the so-called Dead... more
This article explores the mechanisms of fans self-regulation in conflict situations with the showrunners. Conflict situations are encouraged by the unfair treatment that LGBTQ characters receive in TV series, including the so-called Dead Lesbian Syndrome: a narrative cliché that implies a tragic ending for the LGBTQ female characters. In our study, which is methodologically based on reception studies and discourse analysis, we analyse the boycott campaign organized by lesbian and bisexual fans of The 100 (The CW, 2014-) after the death, in the third season, of a charismatic lesbian character: Commander Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey). The results show that fans use the fear of industry reprisals, strategic thinking and the positive portrayal of LGBTQ characters as argumentative strategies designed to contain the action of toxic fans that harass showrunners in social networks, and to protect the social labor of fan activism.
In critical theory, postmodernism has been celebrated for the collapse of the categories of closure and the liberation of the body from its ultimately static status as a border symbol. As bodies have been reconsidered as flexible zones of... more
In critical theory, postmodernism has been celebrated for the collapse of the categories of closure and the liberation of the body from its ultimately static status as a border symbol. As bodies have been reconsidered as flexible zones of difference, places also have come to offer "a further question, another chance, another opening" (Chambers 1990), whereby transsexuality has been hailed as the epitome of this transcendence of the boundaries of body and space (Phillips 2001, HO 2005). Furthermore, given the interrelated, necessary histories of sex reassignment surgery and travel, and of transgender/queer identification and travel, populist representations of transsexuality have relied on the trope of the journey as an allegory for (sex) change. On the one hand, this interpretation has signaled a much-needed positive approach to the understanding of the diverse experiences of sexualized embodiment that are subsumed under the umbrella terms 'transsexuality' and/or 'transgender'. However, the elevation of all things trans as non-referential spatial becoming does not necessarily affirm genderqueer lives: not only does this idea leave pre-modern transhistory without space, but it also ignores the phenomenology of the body in the name of a "naïve trans-tourism" (Einhorn 2002), making it difficult for transpeople to "find their feet" in our lifeworld (Lennon 2006). Drawing on Ewa Einhorn's photo sequence/street performance piece Untitled/She brakes my hurt, this paper will ask how the (gender)queer body might be realized in the tumultuous, not always-already discursive moments of location.
