This presentation was delivered on October 21, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
Queer experience has, until very recently, been invisible or significantly misrepresented in cultural and scholarly fields of record including history, sociology and ethnography. Our own oral histories, performance and self-recording of our lives, communities and culture has occurred almost exclusively through non-formal means. However, queer heritage has seen recent recording through for example: the Hall-Carpenter archives of ephemera, printed material and oral histories at the LSE University Library. and the Bishopsgate Institute Transfabulous Archive of press clippings, photographs and other accounts of Interantional Festivals of Transgender Arts, 2006-2012 (currently on exhibition at The Barbican, London 2022). Both these archives along with queer ethnographers (see e.g., Moffat 2006) and artists (see e.g., Volcano and Dahl 2008) emphasize the critical role safer community, social and performance spaces play in containing, creating and disseminating queer histories and experience. Queer experiences are currently featured more widely than ever through popular culture as well, for example in the world-wide phenomenon of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-), as well as documentaries such as We’re Here (2020-) on HBO and Queer Eye (2018-) on Netflix, all of which have been either nominated for, or won, Emmys. Despite this increased visibility, the need for more grassroots expressions of nonnormative genders and sexualities remains crucial for queer people to find support.
Therefore, as part of my wider work on exploring the potential for live action role-playing games (larps) might have for the exploration of gender subjectivity through play, I suggest that larps can also provide a space to document, disseminate and educate on queer experience, history and culture. Larp is a democratic form of expression that does not require performance skill or training but rather allows people to experience empowerment even if they come from marginalized backgrounds, i.e. through emancipatory bleed (Kemper 2020, Baird 2021, Cazeneuve 2021). Larp is also used for non-formal education on queer history such as in the larp Just a Little Lovin’ about the HiV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, which always includes educational segments of the workshops and debriefs around contextualization (Groth, Grasmo, Edland 2022).
The larp that I am designing, Euphoria, is influenced by the many queer performance and cultural spaces that I have experienced, organised for and performed at over the last two decades (Baird 2022). In this paper, I will highlight the elements of the game design which seeks to reflect and represent the queer cultural and historical contexts that exist within those spaces, as well as the ways in which the game will emphasize documentation of queer experience through the play process.
Bio:
Josephine Baird is a Lecturer at the Uppsala University Department of Game Design and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Vienna. Her work spans the intersection of games, identity, gender, and sexualities. Her research and recent publications present the theoretical and methodological basis for her thesis that role-playing games might provide an opportunity for people to explore their gender subjectivity. Her current research concludes with the design of a live action role-playing game that puts this theory into practice. She is a game designer/consultant, writer, actor, public-speaker, and co-host of the podcast It Is Complicated. More information at josephinebaird.com
Click here to read PDF of slides.
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).