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This article examines North American (i.e., Canada and the United States) video game developers’ understanding of race, how they construct narratives when they include characters of different races, and some of the pressures that may shape that process. Discourse analyses of semistructured interview texts found that video game developers operate under an internalized pressure to create game narratives that are quickly understandable and, thus, sellable. This pressure is normatively internalized in the profession as an attempt to hedge against market uncertainty. Video game developers, therefore, depend on social beliefs from the “real world” to inform how video game players might receive their games as well as narratives and themes from past texts such as the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Therefore, this article argues that racism might be enabled because it is believed to be a hedge against market uncertainty.

Platformed racism offers a unique lens through which to investigate technological structures that enable racism. Online video games, such as EA Sports’ FIFA series — which dominates the soccer video game market share through its touted realism — feature these structures. Like many platforms, FIFA enables representations of real bodies (i.e., professional soccer players). But, unlike many games, FIFA enables game players to directly affect the creation/modification of these representation in the form of player character cards. Analyzing a census of six years of player cards, this study found that platformed racism was enabled because the game’s realism invited racism when players tried to maintain that realism. The study concludes that the catalyst for racism to emerge in FIFA was the drive towards realism.

In Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games author Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall analyzes how films and video games from around the world have depicted slave revolt, focusing on the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). This event, the first successful revolution by enslaved people in modern history, sent shock waves throughout the Atlantic World. Regardless of its historical significance however, this revolution has become less well-known—and appears less often on screen—than most other revolutions; its story, involving enslaved Africans liberating themselves through violence, does not match the suffering-slaves-waiting-for-a-white-hero genre that pervades Hollywood treatments of Black history. Despite Hollywood’s near-silence on this event, some films on the Revolution do exist—from directors in Haiti, the US, France, and elsewhere. Slave Revolt on Screen offers the first-ever comprehensive analysis of Haitian Revolution cinema, including completed films and planned projects that were never made. In addition to studying cinema, this book also breaks ground in examining video games, a pop-culture form long neglected by historians. Sepinwall scrutinizes video game depictions of Haitian slave revolt that appear in games like the Assassin’s Creed series that have reached millions more players than comparable films. In analyzing films and games on the revolution, Slave Revolt on Screen calls attention to the ways that economic legacies of slavery and colonialism warp pop-culture portrayals of the past and leave audiences with distorted understandings.

Peut-on envisager une autre histoire du jeu vidéo ?

Qualifié parfois de « dixième art », après que les jeux de rôles sur table (comme Donjons & Dragons) eurent commencé à céder du terrain dans les loisirs de la jeunesse à partir du mil…

Aucune étude n’a jamais démontré que les formes médiatiques disposeraient d’un pouvoir direct de transformation des réalités sociales. Une approche critique un peu sérieuse préférera ainsi appréhender le jeu vidéo comme le site d’un ensemble de rapports de pouvoir opérant au sein de la culture dominante, traversé, à l’instar d’autres formes culturelles, par des contradictions, des résistances et des réappropriations – autrement dit par des circulations dans la production de sens, les formes et les affects, qui viennent renforcer, nuancer ou déstabiliser les normes de l’hégémonie culturelle. Depuis le début des années 2010 et en particulier la polémique du #GamerGate en 2014, la communauté vidéoludique ne peut plus ignorer le sexisme. Les féministes n’ont pourtant pas attendu si longtemps pour se manifester. Mais c’est peut-être l’année 2012 qui marqua un réel tournant, lorsque Anita Sarkeesian lança une campagne de crowdfunding pour une série de vidéos sur sa chaîne YouTube feministfrequency. Sa démarche déclencha une vague de cyberharcèlement qui alla des insultes aux menaces de mort et jusqu’à la publication de données personnelles. Ce modèle de violence sexiste s’est reproduit à de multiples reprises, notamment en France en 2013 à l’encontre de la créatrice de jeu et féministe Mar_Lard, attaquée pour sa critique argumentée du sexisme dans la culture geek. Elle revenait en particulier sur des propos plus que complaisants d’un journaliste à propos d’une séquence où le personnage de Lara Croft, héroïne du mythique je…

The popularity and visibility of video games within American popular culture is prompted debates within from a spectrum of institutions, ranging from the media and the academy to Main Street and the political sphere. Erasing the complexity, much of the discourse focuses instead on questions of violence and the impact of gaming culture on (White) American youth. While focusing on Grand Theft: San Andreas specifically, this essay explores the culture wars surrounding American video game culture, arguing that the moral panics directed at video games and the defenses/celebrations of virtual reality operate through dominant discourses and hegemonic ideologies of race. Erasing their racial content and textual support for state violence directed at communities of color, the dominant discourse concerning youth and video games rationalizes the fear and policing of Black and Brown communities.

En 2007, le monde du jeu vidéo est secoué par une violente polémique au sujet du jeu vidéo Resident Evil 5. Ce dernier est accusé de faire commerce du racisme, en invitant à se glisser dans la peau d'un américain blanc body-buildé, missionné dans une région africaine anonyme, et tuant des dizaines d'hommes et de femmes noires présentées comme de dangereux zombies infectés du virus T. Depuis, la communauté des joueurs et joueuses de jeux vidéo interpelle régulièrement les créateurs et créatrices des jeux sur les questions du racisme et du sexisme.Dans son ouvrage, Mehdi Derfoufi analyse les rapports de force qui structurent l'industrie du jeu vidéo, dévoilant comment le racisme se niche parfois insidieusement au cœur de scénarios de jeux vidéo à succès. Il nous invite à nous questionner. Quels sont les pays qui pèsent sur les milliards d'euros du marché mondial du jeu vidéo ? Qui sont les game designers et auteurs des jeux ? Comment les représentations racistes sont-elles véhiculées à travers les personnageset les imaginaires vidéoludiques ? L'auteur nous dévoile avec brio les logiques racialisantes à l’œuvre au sein d’un marché économique très concurrentiel où des stéréotypes exotisants servent régulièrement à faire vendre un jeu. Il nous montre aussi comment la division internationale du travail et la hiérarchie économico-politique Nord/Sud pèse sur le marché du jeu vidéo et ralentit l’émergence de nouvelles représentations. Pourtant, de nombreux espoirs, notamment dans les pays du Sud participent au renouvellement de la culture geek : face aux violences racistes, la riposte s’organise.

In several cities in the Southwest and Midwest with sizable enclaves of Chicanos, there are to be found considerable numbers of images that have become leitmotifs of Chicano art. In their ubiquity, these motifs demonstrate that the Chicano phase of Mexican-American art (from 1965 to the 1980s) was nationally dispersed, shared certain common philosophies, and established a network that promoted a hitherto nonexistent cohesion. In other words, it was a movement, not just an individual assembly of Mexican-descent artists. In what follows, Chicano art is examined as statements of a conquered and oppressed people countering oppression and determining their own destiny, though not all the producers of these images necessarily saw their production in the political way they are framed below. Examples have been chosen specifically to show how, in response to exploitation, artists have taken an affirmative stance celebrating race, ethnicity, and class.

Michelle Browder’s “The Mothers of Gynecology” remembers Black women who endured surgeries without anesthesia, or consent.

Examines the soundscapes of Derek Jarman's film "Blue" (1993) and Isaac Julien's video installation 'True north' (2007), and the way they contribute to promoting embodied responses in the viewer. Draws on the writings of Luce Irigaray and Laura U. Marks to explore the relationship between haptic theory and queer spectatorship.

The overlap of marginalised race and sexuality is highlighted in the 1990 documentary "Paris is burning" which depicts the life of New York's black and Latino drag queens. The author offers an analysis of the social circumstances that gave birth to this culture which originated in 1980s Harlem.

The Internet distribution of lesbian-focused films seen as an example of the ways in which independent producers and distributors are offering their films for sale on the web. Incl. a table comparing costs and number of films available across a range of legal and illegal sites.

Stresses the crucial importance of LGBT festivals in promoting examples of queer cinema throughout Europe and the USA.

Straight  Skin,  Gay  Masks  and  Pretending  to  Be  Gay  on  Screen  examines cinematic depictions  of  pretending-to-be-gay,  assessing  performances  that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also  offer  depictions  of  gay  selfhood with  more  nuanced  multidirectional identifications. The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to  cultural  construction  of  human sexualities  in  the  face  of  theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual  stability  and  fluidity  in  cinematic  images  of  men  pretending  to  be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics  and  long-term  queer  visibility  in  a  politically  complicated  mass culture  which  is  mostly  produced  in  a  heteronormative  and  even  hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films  and  TV  series  examined  as  part  of  the  analysis  include  The  Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas, William Friedkin’s Cruising and many other straight and gay screens. This  is  a  fascinating  and  important  study  relevant  to  students  and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.

Toni Morrison purportedly began her career as a novelist because she noticed a dearth of books about black women. As a result of this limitation, Morrison desired to write books “for people like [her], which is to say black people, curious people, demanding people—people who can’t be faked, people who don’t need to be patronized.”¹ Similarly the writer, director, and filmmaker Coquie Hughes (born Latasha Iva Hughes in Chicago in 1970) has produced narratives that feature an array of queer black women—“Girls Like Us” as she calls them in her web series—who are curious, demanding, flawed, and

At the 2012 Golden Globe awards, during her acceptance speech for the Best Actress award for her performance in The Iron Lady (Phyllida Lloyd, 2012), Meryl Streep gave a shout-out to Adepero Oduye for her role as Alike in Dee Rees’s feature film Pariah (2011). The sentiment behind this esteemed acknowledgment was that brilliant performances in important independent films were overlooked and deserved recognition. Streep would go on to win the Best Actress Oscar for a her portrayal of Britain’s first woman prime minister, the a ultraconservative Margaret Thatcher.

Deeply grounded in the legacy of Black lesbian artists, writers, and filmmakers, current Black lesbian filmmakers are helping to build infrastructure for a transformed future using deeply interconnected methods to transform the whole world and (while we’re at it) the meaning of life. This chapter looks at two projects, the established and evolving Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project based in San Francisco and the emerging Queer Renaissance and Black Feminist Film School Project based in Durham, North Carolina, as examples of the robust future of Black lesbian filmmaking as a transformative community-building practice. The Queer Women of Color

Around 1994 or 1995 I came across a call for articles for an anthology to be published by the XII Black International Cinema , documenting ten years of the festival and associated activities, 1986– 95. The request asked for articles and film lists from an international and intercultural group of scholars and filmmakers, and I thought this was an opportunity to document the exciting and pioneering work that was being done by a community of emerging Black lesbian and gay film-and video makers at the time.