bare bones gender info for analysis of play

1. The Analysis of Play

2. Today
1) Some quick feminism
2) The readings
3) Homework

3. Some quick feminism

4. “White men are saving brown
women from brown men.”
• Gayatri Spivak
This sentence aims to convey how certain brands of
feminism become an excuse for colonial and neo-colonial
forms of violence. So, when white men
are all like, "Hey, you! Yeah, you Third World
Women, you! You look oppressed! Why don't
you come live in our super progressive (but still
sexist, heyo) First World countries and be free
from harm… they're actually further silencing the
subaltern.

5. “Representation of the world, like the
world itself, is the work of men; they
describe it from their own point of
view, which they confuse with the
absolute truth.”
“Art is an attempt to integrate evil.”
• Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex

6. “A pedestal is as much a prison as any
small, confined space.”
“No man can call himself liberal, or
radical, or even a conservative
advocate of fair play, if his work
depends in any way on the unpaid or
underpaid labor of women at home,
or in the office.”
• Gloria Steinem

7. “... that gender is a choice, or that
gender is a role, or that gender is a
construction that one puts on, as one
puts on clothes in the morning, that
there is a 'one' who is prior to this
gender, a one who goes to the
wardrobe of gender and decides with
deliberation which gender it will be
today.”
• Judith Butler, from Gender Trouble

8. Sherman
The games are captivating to males primarily
because players compete with each other and with
the machine to "save the princess." They know this
narrative well from multiple sources and are eager
to actually become the hero in the tale. The
heroines, as Teresa de Lauretis explains, are "in
someone else's story, not their own." They become
"figures or markers of positions-places and topoi-through
which the hero and his story move...to
accomplish meaning" (1984:109).

9. Sherman, cont…
Boys see the option of playing the princess in
Mario 2 as strange because "she's the one
you're trying to save"; girls see her as the
heroine who saves the mushroom people, much
like she does in the other Mario games but with
a distinct difference-she doesn't need Mario to
release her from a spell.

10. Sherman…
In Metroid, the heroic character is female, but the
boys did not find that strange, perhaps because she
is an alien. "She has green hair, I think," said one.
The other remarked, "I picture it as an it." Despite
the game booklet's description of the character as
female, girls thought the character was male. "He's
got an astronaut thing, a helmet." Thus, the same
game is discerned differently-the female becomes a
green-haired monster for boys and a male action
figure for girls.

11. Blackmon
Blonde haired, blue eyed princess with a ponytail
who can kick bad guy ass all over the screen. She
doesn’t see Peach as the neurotic, helpless figure
that I did, she sees her as powerful…as her. Sam
meet tons of bricks, ton of bricks meet Sam. Now
all of this time I have been struggling with my own
historical narrative of Peach just as Pea was
building her own narrative for her. For her the pink
was powerful because it was what she wanted and
it still allowed her to kick butt in the process.

12. Blackmon…
…while princesses can be negative role models
that they are not necessarily so. While pink can
be a way of marking something as “inferior” or
used for gender coding in a heteronarmative
society that it can also be empowering if your
choice is just that an informed choice. This is
something that I am sure to struggle with as
time goes on and I welcome the opportunity to
think it all through critically.

13. For Friday
• Challenge day: bring your 3DS and
copy of Smash Bros