It’s LGBT+ History Month and GENDER.ED asked some of our friends to reflect on the queer and trans theory that they love. Here’s celebrating scholarship that shapes our lives and work!
Dr. Merlin Seller is a Lecturer in Design & Screen Cultures, teaching theory and historical/cultural context at ECA, working across Film, Comics, Media and Game Studies, appointed in 2019. Seller is a co-founder of the Game Worlds research cluster alongside Tom Boylston, part of the Centre of Data, Culture and Society.
Who’s your favorite queer/trans theorist and why?
While my first thoughts tend to turn to Sara Ahmed and Cael Keegan for their really generative work on queer phenomenology, to be true to my academic heart my favourite scholar in queer and trans studies is Bo Ruberg (UC Irvine). They’ve been a pivotal figure in recent years within Game Studies for establishing and progressing queer and trans theory approaches in the medium which most of my own passion and research has gravitated towards since coming to Edinburgh. What I love about their work is not only the expanded possibility space they’ve afforded the discipline in terms of discourse on embodiment and our understanding of desire in play, but that they are an indefatigable scholar who puts in the work to create space in the field by surfacing the underappreciated queer games avant garde and publishing both manifesto interventions and stimulating landmark volumes in the field.
What’s a concept from their work that you use and how do you use it?
Ruberg has developed the idea of queer ‘mechanics’ to expand queer game studies analysis beyond representation, and in essence takes the idea of the body as a site of play to ask how games let us inhabit difference in meaningful ways. Here the body is both a game’s fictive ‘avatar’ body, and our own fleshy body pressing fingers to buttons, sticks and screens, and it is ‘mechanics’ (the interaction of systems) that can reinscribe the relationship between them. I like to use this idea of queer mechanics/the queering of mechanics to both explore the power of haptic and temporal involvement in play experiences communicating trans and queer lives and ontologies, as well as using it to put pressure on what we define as interactive/non-interactive.
If we had to read one thing by them, what would you recommend and why?
My easy recommendation is Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019), it’s a wonderfully accessible volume full of diverse and generative standalone chapters connecting a wide literature that I think speaks to Ruberg’s strong ethic of care, consideration and academic community building. It’s a text that isn’t interested in grand statements or laying claim to a new subfield for the author, instead its radical softness of approach is in the title: it exposes the queerness of play in its richness and subtlety. The book really provides so many points of departure and welcomes all readers from all disciplines: it touches on everything from dark affects to queer temporality to reception studies discourse analyses to an engrossing close-reading of a slapstick octopus game. It’s clearly a labour of love, and I think it can make anyone feel at home in games even if you haven’t had time to play since you were a child.
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Ruth Griggs is a second year PhD student at the University of Edinburgh studying the intersections between queerness and veganism. Ruth explores these cultures, identities and ideas across a range of spaces from anti-capitalist collectives to hip vegan cafes.
One of my favourite queer theorists is Greta Gaard, an ecofeminist who writes about the importance of a queer lens within ecofeminism. Gaard’s ideas are key to the field of queer ecology, where society’s relationships to nature are explored through a particular attention to sexuality. Gaard questions how expressions of sexuality manifest in our very conceptualisation of nature and what/whom is considered natural/unnatural. These are some of my favourite ideas to explore because it really shows you how our constructions of sexuality have an influence over everything in our lives and society, even how we engage with nature on an individual level. I find this super exciting because it extends the scope of ‘queerness’ and what queerness means to me. In other words, it means I can express my queerness through my relationship to nature, animals and my environmental attitudes, taking queerness beyond the confines of simply a sexuality.
One key concept Gaard draws attention to is the environmental practices of lesbians within the 1960s and 70s. Instead of just focusing on lesbian separatism and the new relationships lesbians formed with the land in these spaces, Gaard also highlights the correlation between lesbians and vegetarianism. She demonstrates that vegetarianism has a long history in lesbian communities, both inside and outside of city spaces, something that is not often explored in academic literature. In this way she highlights that vegetarianism/veganism is a practice rooted in the queer community. I use these ideas to explore media tropes of queer vegans and to examine the potential of a queer veganism and how this may be practised in contemporary times.
I would recommend ‘Toward a Queer Ecofeminism’ (1997) as this lays out Gaard’s reasons behind pushing for a queer lens in ecofeminism, establishing some of her key ideas and the values associated with the examination of queerness and nature hand in hand. As an overall argument, this text can lead you in many different directions depending on your own particular interests. For me it led to the study of veganism and queerness, but there are many different paths you can take in terms of queer ecofeminism.
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Dr. Gina Gwenffrewi recently graduated with a PhD in Trans Studies / English Literature in June 2021, with the thesis ‘Transgender Gaze, Neoliberal Haze: the impact of neoliberalism on trans female bodies in the Anglophone Global North.’ Her research interests include trans-exclusionary ideologies and the impact of media representations on trans bodies. Gina is passionate about trans arts, and she blogs with particular joy during the Edinburgh Festival on her favourite acts.
Who’s your favorite queer/trans theorist and why?
I came to Trans Studies from Creative Writing, which might colour my answer here. I love the writing of trans scholar Eva Hayward. In her essay ‘Spider City Sex’ (2010), Hayward describes her transitioning as a trans woman in San Francisco, including the impact of hormones on her senses and the physicality of spaces around her. When I read this essay, I had only just begun transitioning as well, and I guess I suffered from a major complex about how I came across to the general public. Hayward’s writing, with its often intoxicating style, frames the process of transitioning as magical and sublime, I’d never encountered anything like this before, I suddenly felt a kind of transcendence and a greater confidence in being trans. Intellectually too, her analysis is sharp as well as enduringly relevant: she calls out thinkers like Baudrillard and Braidotti for reducing trans people to flawed abstract concepts, something happening today with attacks on trans rights being dressed up as fighting ‘gender ideology.’ Conceptually and stylistically, I think Hayward’s writing speaks to me like few others.
What’s a concept from their work that you use and how do you use it?
Hayward’s ‘Spider City Sex’ essay is autoethnographic: she begins with a conceptual focus on the significance of the transitioning trans body, before shifting to a series of diary entries about her personal experience of transitioning. Perhaps its due to my being a former creative-writing scholar, but I found this transition of genre really arresting. Later in about 2021, I was writing an essay about the Scottish media coverage of the JK Rowling furore, when I found myself reproducing an authoethnographic style, as I wanted to convey the personal impact of the media transphobia and silencing of trans voices on my own mental health. My article, ‘JK Rowling and the Echo Chamber of Secrets,’ was published in 2022 in Trans Studies Quarterly, and I think it reflects Hayward’s influence on my work, as well as the possibilities for minorities in academia to convey intellectual and personal dimensions in their work.
If we had to read one thing by them, what would you recommend and why?
As I’ve already talked about Hayward’s essay ‘Spider City Sex,’ I’d like to switch to another trans theorist with a sublime writing style: Paul Preciado. Preciado is well-known for his radical re-imagining of trans identity, by severing its connection to medicalization. His first full book, ‘Testo Junkie’ (2013), is both brilliant and intimidating, especially for those unfamiliar with the ideas Preciado is engaging with. A much more accessible work is Preciado’s collection of meditations, ‘An Apartment on Uranus’ (2019). Preciado uses a queer/trans reading to re-imagine the nation and its many systems. The writing is tender and humane, sometimes personal and sometimes empathetic in its depiction of a tragic personal story. I think ‘An Apartment on Uranus’ is perhaps the most profound and unified queer/trans work that imagines a better world, and God knows we need such a vision at the moment.
