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Dragon Age: Inquisition s (2014) release opened a new world of character creation for the single-player RPG genre. Upon release, it allowed the player an extensive amount of customization. In addition to the typical variety of choices associated with hairstyle and color, face structure, tattoos, eye color, scarring, etc. the game also provides in-game unique sexuality quest lines that highlight the spectrum of sexual choices, race-defined features, different class options, and body-positive representations, which the player could project onto their avatar. However, in a game heralded as groundbreaking for representation, the creators fail to acknowledge the non-binary gender expressions of their players, instead, forcing the player to choose between the traditional male and female characters. This paper seeks to explore the different ways in which Dragon Age: Inquisition (DAI) purports to incorporate modern notions of representation in the sphere of gender and sexuality but fail to do so, instead, reinforcing traditional binary representations of gender and sexuality informed by racial and religious assumptions

Most writing on transgender cinema focuses on representations of trans people, rather than works made by trans people. This article surveys the history of trans and gender variant people creating audiovisual media from the beginning of cinema through today. From the professional gender impersonators of the stage who crossed into film during the medium’s first decades to selfidentified transvestite and transsexual filmmakers, like Ed Wood and Christine Jorgensen of the mid-twentieth century, to the enormous upsurge in trans filmmaking of the 1990s, this article explores the rich and complex history of trans and gender variant filmmaking. It also considers the untraceable gender variant filmmakers who worked in film and television without their gender history becoming known and those who made home movies that have been lost to history.

Analyses the narrative and formal elements of Kim Kyung-mook's "Stateless things" (2011) to argue how it critiques South Korea’s ethnocentrism and homophobic social structures by delineating a queer use of space. Gives recent examples of homoeroticism in commercial and independent South Korean cinema. Argues that Kim's film expand the definition of queer Korean cinema by deconstructing and reconstructing the heteronormative, progress-driven cityscape of Seoul.

Gaming Representation' offers a timely and interdisciplinary call for greater inclusivity in video games. The issue of equality transcends the current focus in the field of Game Studies on code, materiality, and platforms. Journalists and bloggers have begun to hold the digital game industry and culture accountable for the discrimination routinely endured by female gamers, queer gamers, and gamers of color. Video game developers are responding to these critiques, but scholarly discussion of representation in games has lagged behind. Contributors to this volume examine portrayals of race, gender, and sexuality in a range of games, from casuals like Diner Dash, to indies like Journey and The Binding of Isaac, to mainstream games from the Grand Theft Auto, BioShock, Spec Ops, The Last of Us, and Max Payne franchises. Arguing that representation and identity function as systems in games that share a stronger connection to code and platforms than it may first appear, 'Gaming Representation' pushes gaming scholarship to new levels of inquiry, theorizing, and imagination.

Violence and the dead are major thematics in the sociopolitical art of Teresa Margolles. Born in Culiacan, Mexico, Margolles unfalteringly exposes the social causes and consequences of the endemic violence that ravages her country: violent deaths from the drug trade, exclusions, feminicides, and social injustice. Many of her works consist of substances or objects that have been in close contact to violent crimes and dead bodies, such as water with which corpses have been cleaned, blood-soaked earth, or fabric drenched in body fluids. This monograph brings together works from the past decade, along with pieces that have never been shown before, including sculptural and photographic installations, performative interventions and videos. Spare, yet powerfully moving, Margolles's work reaches out and brings the viewer into the world of those whose lives have been made invisible.

The publication of Whose Land Is It Anyway? A Manual for Decolonization is inspired by a 2016 speaking tour by Arthur Manuel, less than a year before his untimely passing in January 2017. The handbook provides a variety of Indigenous perspectives on the history of colonialism, current Indigenous activism and resistance, and outlines the path forward to reconciliation

Pedro Almodóvar is an internationally acclaimed Spanish director. The national and international fascination over Almodóvar's cinema lies in his ability to reflect the problems of contemporary society, his lucidity in combining the urban and the rural, his ability to express the frustrations of modern man, as well as his freshness and spontaneity. Although the vast majority of studies on this Spanish director have focused on women and the gay world, his films are crowded with many types and archetypes of heterosexual men. This groundbreaking edited volume studies the men in the cinema of Almodóvar from a broad yet comprehensive and complementary perspective. Each chapter of All About Almodóvar's Men methodically dissects these male characters—their misery and their greatness, their frustrations and their desires—offering a kaleidoscopic view of man that goes beyond the narrow framework in which many studies have locked the rich cinema of Almodóvar.

Le territoire constitue une force déterminante dans la création artistique. Les prairies austères, notamment, exigent des artistes actuels comme de ceux qui les ont précédés une adaptation constante, déterminée par l'accès aux ressources et la nécessité de mobilité. Cet article s'intéresse à l'impact du territoire sur la pratique du perlage telle qu'exercée par les femmes autochtones. Il met en relation des exemples de perlage traditionnel conservés dans les collections muséales de la Saskatchewan avec les œuvres de trois artistes contemporaines autochtones des plaines, soit Ruth Cuthand, Judy Anderson et Katherine Boyer. La comparaison vise à mieux comprendre le processus intergénérationnel de transmission des pratiques ancestrales et ainsi révéler comment s'exprime le territoire dans les objets et œuvres ornés de perles, qui contribuent à façonner le récit des plaines.

The in-depth, diverse, and accessible essays in Queer Game Studies use queerness to challenge the ideas that have dominated gaming discussions. This volume reveals the capacious albeit underappreciated communities that are making, playing, and studying queer games, demonstrating the centrality of LGBTQ issues to the gamer world and establishing an alternative lens for examining this increasingly important culture.

Homi Bhabha’s pivotal 1994 book,The Location of Culture, begins with an epigraph from Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from whichsomething begins its presencing.” Cultural engagement, whether antagonistic or affiliative in nature, is produced performatively – not as a reflection of something that is given or set in stone, but as an ongoing process of negotiation.

A non-foundationalist construct for the Feiticeiro/a character that assumes neither an essentialist nature nor a determinist set of activities is possible. This does not prescribe a ‘type’ of ‘pervert’ character, but instead delineates an epistemic framing for a Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an etymologically based semiotic approach to character construction that accounts for a Derridean view that language is constituted by binary reciprocal delimitations and for a view of sex as a dereified expression of materialised instances of engagement by sexual subjects, in terms of which sexuality is rendered as an opened-outward and connected function. The chapter further deals with an approach based in an empathic engagement between audiences and Feiticeiro/a characters, which is apposite for audiences identifying with but not necessarily liking characters. The chapter closes the volume’s argument around how transgressive, sexually focused Feiticeiro/a characters might productively be constructed in terms other than of essences and determinist actions, but in terms of ‘meaning’ found in the points of connection between heterogeneous bodily surfaces.

Conservative discourses remain powerful in contemporary life. These demonise the notion of sexual transgressiveness without helping to give a clear, value neutral definition of what ‘transgressive’ is. Screenwriters attempting to write it into characters are therefore likely to rely on psychiatric epistemologies for sexual ‘perversion’ as framings for subjectivity. Unfortunately, Freudian epistemologies of ‘perversion’ render the psychical subject as invisible through built-in determining comparative reference to heteropatriarchal norms and through distinctions between ‘non-pathological’ and ‘pathological’ definitions. This chapter explores the Freudian constructs that entrench this, together with post-structuralist foundations that might revise the constitution and role of the individual subject (and therefore of filmic characters as facsimiles of real people) as he/she relates to the material world as a physical entity, and as he/she manipulates the discourses to which he/she is subject.

A post-humanist lens is useful as a starting-point to remedy the absenting and invisibilising effects of sexological epistemologies for the purposes of conceiving a constitution of ‘pervert’ filmic characters, since certain strains of existential thinking have a meta-theoretical pliancy that is useful for reflecting the non-binary character of complex people beyond simple identity categories, across a range of types and styles of filmic products. If matched with a semiological approach such as that espoused by Barthes, it thereby becomes possible to manipulate signs in the form of character constructions to represent people as more than the sum of their parts and to contain deeper significations that are built into the fabric of their construction. This requires a deeper understanding of the semiotic notion of ‘semes’ as the foundation for character construction. To this end, this chapter explores how sexual ‘perversion’ as reflected in notion of the ‘feitiço’ might serve as a foundation for a new episteme for ‘perverse’ characters, as the Feiticeiro/a as ‘sorcerer/sorceress’.

The notion of ‘perversity’ suggests inherent transgressiveness. However, a focus on practices does not help identify who filmic characters are in ways that might inform a paradigm for character identity suitable for translation into a visual medium. Failing to achieve this clarity, ‘perverts’ often end up as ‘ambulatory objects’ at once imagined and defined by what is not present. This chapter engages how this manifests in the nineteenth-century sexological discourses that reflected perverse prurience in terms of assumptions that all entities might be empirically identifiable in the same way that material phenomena can be perceived by means of the senses, which is especially visible in the various incarnations of Freudian constructs of ‘fetishism’ that refuse personal agency through reliance on a range of psychodynamic constructs.

If character actions are not to be seen in deterministic ways, then an alternative framing should be considered on which writers might base constructs of complexity of action. This is possible if action itself is seen as an expression of relationality rather than as activity-as-substance. Looking at people in this way enables the behaviour of Feiticeiro/a characters to be seen as activities that are more than the actions of combinations of sexed bodies in physical spaces. This chapter explores a construct for action on this basis as it becomes possible by acknowledging in a construct of ‘doing’ the phenomenological notions of ‘being’ as a Feiticeiro/a form constituted by a hybrid of ‘object-discourse-nature-society’ characterised by networks of confluence. The chapter explores the notion of the Feiticeiro/a character in terms of an internal coherency, taking account of interactions and activities (as exhibited through their material form), ‘naturalness’, linearity of course of action and embodied notions of meaning-creation.

Interesting and challenging Hollywood-style films that centre on sexually transgressive characters are not easy to script. Many writers fail as a result of an over-valuation of image at the expense of psychologically complex and challenging subjectivity. A hook for exploring the nature of this phenomenon lies in the notion of ‘involving and disturbing’, with a focus on how films might represent it and how audiences might perceive it, and with attention paid to how characters might be constructed. The chapter expands on how this notion of audience engagement might engage with screenwriting as a design function, aimed to construct characters in visual terms yet through words rather than pictures. In addressing certain epistemic limitations to writing character complexity, an alternative epistemic framing for ‘perverse’ characters is considered in terms of characterological ‘is-ness’, philosophical constitution and behaviours and actions.

In seeking to find a solid paradigm for the Feiticeiro/a character, it is tempting to approach the established psychiatric categories. Unfortunately, many of these suggest that people are ineffably different from others and that people will behave according to type in a predictable, even inevitable way. This chapter explores the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which merely re-inscribes essentialist and determinist tendencies by means of processes akin to the phenomenon of cross-linguistic influence and linguistic fixity. The chapter explores further how this is embedded in the category of ‘fetishism’, ‘fetishistic transvestism’ and ‘transvestic fetishism’, which contain certain problematic vestigial tails of Freudian categories that make the psychiatric definitions of ‘fetishism’ unsuitable as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character.

If the Feiticeiro/a character is to be seen as a structure rather than a substance, the nature of such a structure requires elaboration. If this paradigm is to be internally coherent, a relation of intertwined co-existence between characters and audiences should be built into the framing in ways that provide functional epistemic signposts for mechanisms to translate characters’ intrinsic complexity to these audiences. This chapter approaches this by accounting both for the particularly visual nature of the filmic medium and for how screenplays are not a visual medium themselves and are put to different uses than other forms of narrative writing, therefore requiring distinctive attributes. An orientational notion of relationship between medium and audience is suggested as a foundation for the structure of Feiticeiro/a characters in terms of the philosophical distinction between ‘being’ and ‘appearance’, on the basis of which decisions might be made as to which elements of the character’s constitution should be made apparent and which should either remain invisible or intentionally be obfuscated.

The categories for ‘perversion’ in the World Health Organization’s ICD fail to describe people and their practices, thereby obscuring the remarkable singularity of individuals and diversity of groups. Instead, they prescribe heteronormative sexual behaviour, which is unhelpful as a foundation for the Feiticeiro/a character. This chapter explores an alternative epistemic construct, as becomes available in the notion of a focalising character, which reflects a ‘semic’ construct that negates the notion of a ‘pervert’ character as a substance, but instead embraces the notion of a Feiticeiro/a character as a structure. The chapter further explores the philosophical nature of this structure as it relates to the thematic elements of a narrative whilst engaging in believable activities in a material world. The chapter then suggests an approach to structure based in a phenomenological notion of the replacement of ‘substance’ with ‘form’/‘structure’ as the foundation of meaning.

An episteme for the Feiticeiro/a as a filmic character who is ‘perverse’ needs a form if it is to be useful to writers wanting to construct complex transgressive sexual characters. The beginnings of this framing are productively associated with the semiotic notion of ‘connotation’. This chapter explores what is meant by complexity in character construction and suggests a framing focused on character as an embodied being as a helpful starting-point for an episteme for characterological ‘perversion’. The chapter explores this as a non-foundationalist framing that transcends problematic Cartesian distinctions, concrete object materiality and woolly broad-stroke statements of a disembodied discursive constitution of social and personal experience.