The Analysis of Play

Today1) Some quick feminism2) The readings3) Homework

Some quick feminism

“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.

“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

“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

“... 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

ShermanThe 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).

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.

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.

BlackmonBlonde 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.

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.

For Friday• Challenge day: bring your 3DS and

copy of Smash Bros