Gender Hope re: Video Games

[eredien]

I don't play Dragon Age 2, but the gist of it is this: your player character can get hit on in-game by male or female NPCs. You, as a PC, can choose to turn down their advances and advance the plot some other way, or continue talking to them and advance the plot that way.

A straight white male gamer wrote to Bioware about how this made him cry.

A BioWare writer wrote back, basically saying, "check your privilege. Straight white guys aren't our only market and aren't the only gamers we care about, and homophobes definitely aren't."

Then there was a comments thread. A comments thread where people said sensible things like (paraphrased): "just turn them down politely if you aren't interested, just like you'd do in real life," or "I can't believe this is 2011 and we're still having this discussion," or "straight white guys see gay people in their games and get uncomfortable; gay people see straight white guys in real life and get killed. You're really lucky, straight white guys," or even, "so, you're homophobic. You recognize gay people make you uncomfortable. That's what that word means. Deal with it. Accept that people are going to call you that until such time as you're not uncomfortable anymore, because that's what you are. Deal with the consequences of having the fears you admit to having."

For the most part, it's a really inspiring comments thread. It makes me feel like anti-racism work and anti-homophobia work is really, actually, affecting real life.

Video gaming fans--just regular people who like to play games!--are talking about stuff like privilege and gender identity and joking about adding options for Kinsey scale sliders during character creation, then pointing out that wouldn't help anyway since it's not like your PC is walking around with a big sign over their head telling NPCs that they're straight. People were thanking each other for mounting eloquent defenses of multiple types of queer visibility in mass media platforms in the face of heterosexual normativity. It was pretty inspirational.

Comments

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I just want to say thank you for using the phrase "heterosexual normativity" instead of "heteronormativity", which really ought not to mean the same thing.

(The actual response from BioWare and the comment thread are really cool, too, but I'd already heard about them.)

[eredien]

So, I've been rereading this comment and thinking about this, and I'm wondering if you would expand on what you're thinking and saying here.

I don't think of the word "heteronormativity" as some kind of slur on heterosexual people or the large and varied set of heterosexual sexual behaviors and practices, and have never seen it used as such, but that doesn't mean it's not one (it's totally possible for a word to be used in academic contexts and carry negative connotations at the same time; academia isn't a shield admitting only the purest ideals); it just means I'm unaware of the problematic usage you're pointing out.

I've generally seen "heteronormativity" used mostly in academic gender contexts to refer to the large and varied set of heterosexual sexual behaviors and practices practiced by heterosexual people, and the normative cultural implications and baggage those practices carry: the assumption that heterosexuality and heterosexual behavior is a norm.

I guess what I'm getting at is: I don't think I was using "heterosexual normativity" as opposed to "heteronormativity" as a deliberate word choice on my part, but you seem to think I was. I wanted to clarify that I wasn't; your kudos are misplaced. (I shouldn't get those kudos even if it *had* been a deliberate choice, but I definitely shouldn't be getting them here, since I'm totally unaware of the apparently problematic implications of my word choice).

Though I can start to guess at why "heteronormativity" might be problematic (there isn't just one set of heterosexual behaviors that is normative for even heterosexual people, for example), I don't see the whole picture (I can't see how "heterosexual normativity" would challenge that problematic assumption). I know that any guesses I make are only going to be incomplete at best and actively erroneous at worst.

Since it does seem there is some kind of controversy, this is a big hole in my knowledge; it's embarrassing to be writing and thinking about gender and not even really be aware enough of this controversy to make my word choice count (as a writer, that's a really big problem). That's what's most worrying to me--I haven't come across any writings or thoughts on this word choice or construct before. It's possible I just haven't read widely enough.

Could you point me to some resources? I usually wouldn't ask that, because it's my job to try and educate myself, except that in my searches I haven't been able to find much of a controversy over the word to educate myself about. "Heteronormativity as a slur," "heteronormativity vs. hetersexual normativity," "heteronormative problematic language," etc. haven't turned up much of anything other than

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So, I've been rereading this comment and thinking about this, and I'm wondering if you would expand on what you're thinking and saying here.

I don't think of the word "heteronormativity" as some kind of slur on heterosexual people or the large and varied set of heterosexual sexual behaviors and practices, and have never seen it used as such, but that doesn't mean it's not one (it's totally possible for a word to be used in academic contexts and carry negative connotations at the same time; academia isn't a shield admitting only the purest ideals); it just means I'm unaware of the problematic usage you're pointing out.

I've generally seen "heteronormativity" used mostly in academic gender contexts to refer to the large and varied set of heterosexual sexual behaviors and practices practiced by heterosexual people, and the normative cultural implications and baggage those practices carry: the assumption that heterosexuality and heterosexual behavior is a norm.

I guess what I'm getting at is: I don't think I was using "heterosexual normativity" as opposed to "heteronormativity" as a deliberate word choice on my part, but you seem to think I was. I wanted to clarify that I wasn't; your kudos are misplaced. (I shouldn't get those kudos even if it *had* been a deliberate choice, but I definitely shouldn't be getting them here, since I'm totally unaware of the apparently problematic implications of my word choice).

Though I can start to guess at why "heteronormativity" might be problematic (there isn't just one set of heterosexual behaviors that is normative for even heterosexual people, for example), I don't see the whole picture (I can't see how "heterosexual normativity" would challenge that problematic assumption). I know that any guesses I make are only going to be incomplete at best and actively erroneous at worst.

Since it does seem there is some kind of controversy, this is a big hole in my knowledge; it's embarrassing to be writing and thinking about gender and not even really be aware enough of this controversy to make my word choice count (as a writer, that's a really big problem). That's what's most worrying to me--I haven't come across any writings or thoughts on this word choice or construct before. It's possible I just haven't read widely enough.

Could you point me to some resources? I usually wouldn't ask that, because it's my job to try and educate myself, except that in my searches I haven't been able to find much of a controversy over the word to educate myself about. "Heteronormativity as a slur," "heteronormativity vs. hetersexual normativity," "heteronormative problematic language," etc. haven't turned up much of anything other than <a href="http://xploragen.blogspot.com/2009/03/heteronormative.html>people saying things like</a>: "This is the problem, then, with heteronormativity: it takes cultural constructs and pretends they are natural, thereby marking all other possibilities as "unnatural," "deviant," "abnormal," none of which have a positive ring to them in the slightest," which honestly I personally can't disagree with and don't find problematic.

I did find <a href="http://blogs.theeagleonline.com/wingin-it/2011/02/how-many-ways-can-we-be-normative/">this article</a>, but IMO that's somebody not getting the idea that heteronormativity is not merely "the idea that society is setup with norms and values that align sex, sexuality and gender roles," but is instead the idea that those "norms and values" default to assumptions of heterosexuality and heterosexual behaviors, which defaults to creating the assumption that heterosexuality and heterosexual behaviors are 'normal,' and all other gendered ways of being/acting are 'abnormal.'

I don't think that's what you're talking about, either--so, can you please clarify?

Also, if you are still living in Somerville, I'd love to hang out with you sometime.

[eredien]

Here are the links, working:

http://xploragen.blogspot.com/2009/03/heteronormative.html

http://blogs.theeagleonline.com/wingin-it/2011/02/how-many-ways-can-we-be-normative/

[eredien]

Additional thought:

Also, this book looks like it might have some interesting thoughts on the subject, but it doesn't come out until April.

http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&edition_id=12964&title_id=9799&calctitle=1&lang=cy-GB

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

It's actually a completely different issue than the ones you've thought of, at a different level -- my issue is that the prefix "hetero" has a useful meaning apart from its use in "heterosexual", just as "homo" has a useful meaning apart from its use in "homosexual". The word "heteronormativity", when used to mean "heterosexual normativity", implies that "hetero" is just short for "heterosexual", and risks losing the meaning of useful words like "heterogeneous", etc.

[eredien]

I do believe that prefixes should not be used by themselves to refer to peoples' sexual preferences, since the prefix itself may be used in a variety of scientific or theoretical/linguistic concepts (heterozygous, etc.).

Therefore, when speaking, I try never to use the word "hetero" or "homo" to refer to someone's sexual preference (besides which, I find it demeaning and linguistically problematic). When I am writing, I only use the prefixes by themselves when I make it clear they are prefixes (for instance, in the sentence "either preference, hetero- or homosexual," which I probably wouldn't really write anyway because it reinforces the idea of a sexual preference binary.)

However, "heterosexual" is a long-established linguistic, sociological, and scientific use of the prefix, just like "heterogeneous" or "heterozygous" or "homonym." If people are going to hear "heterozygous" and think about sexual preference, it's not because "heterosexual" or "heteronormativity" are somehow more valid words than "heterozygous;" it's because people have been using the prefix itself to denote the sexual preference. I don't like that, for grammatical and gender-theory reasons, so I don't use it in my speech, and try to ask people to expand to the full word for precision's sake when I'm in a venue where I feel comfortable doing that.

But "heteronormative" is an important concept, and one which needs to be more widely spread than it is. I can't really get behind the idea that enough people know the word "heteronormativity" to believe that the people who use the word "heteronormative" are really redefining the entire "hetero-" prefix all by themselves, so all that people think about when they hear the prefix is sexual preference.

I do understand your argument that "heterosexual normativity" is more scientifically precise, perhaps, and in my speech I am as sympathetic to that argument as I feel I can possibly demonstrate personally. But "heteronormativity" is equally linguistically precise in the field of critical studies and gender theory. It's a concept that more people should use. It's a concept that's been around for over a decade now. I'd rather have the concept of heteronormativity become common currency by using a slightly problematic word, than have the concept fade out because people are worried that the "hetero-" prefix is only going to be understood to mean "heterosexual" rather than as a generalized prefix taken from the Greek and used in all sorts of words.

If people don't know that the words "heterozygous" or "heterogeneous" exist--and have nothing to do with people having sex--I would say that points to a worrying lack of basic scientific literacy, and a problematic evolution of slang terminology, rather than a problem with overfamiliarity with critical terms in gender theory.

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

My general feeling is that anyone already using an eight syllable word like "heteronormativity" isn't going to have any difficulty using a slightly longer two word phrase instead, and if anything, it's easier to understand on first encounter when broken down into simpler chunks (though I suspect that most people who don't commonly discuss critical and gender theory aren't really going to be familiar with "normativity" at all).

[starongie.livejournal.com]

Well this just made my day better. OH HUMANITY I HAVE SUCH MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT YOU BUT these things just make me be all, OH FUCK YES.

[doma.livejournal.com]

I was really impressed with the response, yeah.