Kafai and Heeter, Part 4 (Changing Girls, Changing Games) 193-263. (Choose one essay, or ask a question of the section intro)

or

Gender and Fan Studies Debate Round 2 Parts 1, 2, and comments (Link in week by week breakdown)

The reading explored gender and sexuality in video game representation and video game experience, suggesting that the Lara Croft video game franchise might offer, to a limited degree at least, new representations of active female power, and of male identification with a female avatar. Do these shifts in gender representation and engagement also manifest in the film versions of video games? Is Lara Croft in the movie Tomb Raider as potentially empowering as game-Lara Croft? Or is she still a disempowered spectacle, to-be-looked-at, as in the scenario originally described by Laura Mulvey?

How are the negotiations of gender in the Lara Croft game series recreated or transformed when adapted to film in Tomb Raider? For example, how does this preoccupation with the female stunting body & desire to know discussed by Kennedy manifest in the film (or does it not?) What about the fetishization of the digital powerful female, the highlighting of the construction of femininity and gender? And how about questions of transgender identification? Is Lara still equally available for male and female engagement?

As a reminder, the assigned readings are as follows:

• Kafai and Heeter (Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat) Preface.
• Kafai and Heeter, Part 1 (Reflections on a Decade of Gender and Gaming) 1-46.

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I’d recommend that if you choose to write your 1 page paper on vids, you choose one or two and perform a sustained analysis, rather than trying to talk about them all en masse.

Conversely, can you locate elements of the heteronormative in these two episodes/series (in narrative structure, for example, or in their use of genre codes) as well as elements of queerness? How do the two interact/coexist within one text?

And finally, how does this challenge of watching a series through a particular lens (which may or not be a mode of viewing familiar to you, and may or may not match with your own narrative of self and sexuality) impact your experience of the series? Does this become an act of negotiated viewing? Does it change the way you view the media texts in their entirety? Do the queer meanings transform your understanding of the work of the whole series?