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

[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).