Browsing by Author "Mason, Derritt"
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- ItemOpen AccessFailure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Game Novels(2020-08-27) Brooks, Laura; Mason, Derritt; Whaley, Ben; Prud'homme-Cranford, RainConsidering the important process of using queer theory as a mode of resisting the ableist white cisheteropatriarchy of mainstream video games, Failure is the Name of the Game: Queer Failure in Video Games Novels seeks to bring this work into the literary sphere. I use the theoretical frame of queer failure to examine a quickly expanding subgenre of fiction, the video game novel, where video games serve as key elements of a novel’s plot and setting. Each chapter examines a phenomenon of real-life video games and compares how these phenomena have manifested themselves or been challenged in literature. Chapter One challenges the persisting heteronormativity of classic video game culture to queer Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game by proving that there is reparative queer content in these otherwise heteronormative texts. Chapter Two examines the heteronormative impulse of e-sports through the example of Riot Games’ League of Legends and how Marie Lu’s Warcross queers this gaming genre. Finally, Chapter Three examines the racism embedded in Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft and the massively multiplayer online role-playing game genre and explores how Brittney Morris’s SLAY responds to this tradition by creating a gaming space for only Black players which begins to empower Black transgender gamers. Ultimately, my thesis demonstrates that not only have video games always been queer, as games scholar Bonnie Ruberg suggests, but so have video game novels. I assert that video game novels and the practice of reading video game novels queerly should become part of the conversation surrounding queer game studies. Further, I argue that these literary works have the potential to provide direction to real-life video games as the genre begins to imagine answers to the issues of the dominant gaming community and the development process to create alternative worlds and futures for video games.
- ItemOpen AccessHow to Repeat Silence: HIV/AIDS, Queer History, and Youth Fiction(2024-04-26) Virtue, Xen; Mason, Derritt; Mayr, Suzette; Martino, AlanHow to Repeat Silence: HIV/AIDS, Queer History, and Youth in Fiction addresses the substantial gaps, omissions, and inaccuracies in how HIV/AIDS has been represented in young adult literature (YA), particularly since the advent of antiretrovirals in the mid–nineties. Utilizing creative fiction, I reframe the narrative that HIV/AIDS is a historical issue bearing no impact on individuals in the present, showcasing realistic risks of transmission and informing on modern HIV education. This project’s creative component, How to Repeat Silence, a YA novel, aims to connect young adults more intimately, and realistically, with HIV/AIDS, through the contemporary first–person story of Gabriel “Gabe” Peters – a seventeen–year–old transgender boy newly diagnosed with HIV. Upon his diagnosis he learns that his late uncle, whom he named himself for, passed away due to AIDS complications and not cancer like he thought. The novel follows Gabe as he and his family take a trip to Vancouver to learn more about Gabe’s uncle just one month prior to the thirtieth anniversary memorial they’re supposed to host. Amid connecting with old family friends, Gabe must deal with his feelings surrounding his own diagnosis, his unfolding family drama, and the secrets he’s keeping from his best friend to come to terms with what being HIV–positive means for him and his family. This project makes additional strides within young adult literature through its inclusion of a trans protagonist and queer family members, paying homage to the ways queer communities were impacted by the initial AIDS crisis in North America while retaining focus on the present. The exegesis of this project contextualizes the creative choices made through close analysis of the field of YA HIV/AIDS literature, particularly through which characters have HIV/AIDS, how these characters contracted the illness, what happens to them at the end of their stories, and what that collective narrative says about HIV/AIDS messages. An urgent and hopeful work, this project provides a fresh perspective on how we talk about HIV/AIDS, both with teenagers and culturally.
- ItemEmbargoRefractions: Queer History Cast Through Experimental Poetry(2024-01-16) Meunier, Paul; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Sullivan, Rebecca; Lai, Larissa; Prud'homme-Cranford, Rain L.; Mason, Derritt; Leblanc, Jean-René; Crawford, LucasRefractions, the creative manuscript in this dissertation, presents a long-form poetry narrative of the figurative being Thousand, born through refracted light in future Calgary, Alberta, that follows their search for family in an unfamiliar space. Divided into five “Movements” that emulate a symphony, Thousand’s search for their parentage reveals a familial fabric of queerness and kinship, beyond the nuclear family unit, as they slowly learn of the community network that surrounds them. In this future space, mothers and aunts create worlds like gods, characters forge bonds across thresholds of life and death, and queer parents represent a space for love, creation, and generative capacity, outside of traditional notions of progeny. Refractions is a story of queer kinship, chosen family, and ontological awakening. As Thousand learns where they come from, authorial memoirs are stored, illuminated, and shared within the site of the queer and future archive. By exploring multidirectional conduits between past and future, Thousand not only learns of where they come from and the formative powers of chosen family, but they discover their own language for queer identity, agency, and the capacity to pursue an undefined future. The critical exegesis presents a lineage of creative foundations and theoretical examinations that influence this manuscript. These include the short stories that weave antinarrative together in Wayde Compton’s The Outer Harbour, and the speculative fiction and mythmaking in Catherynne M. Valente’s Silently and Very Fast. Theoretical reflections underscore the importance of writing as community-situated, the politics of cultural appropriation, ethics and accountabilities. Refractions also considers the charge in José Esteban Muñoz’s pursuit for queer utopia, mindful of how Joan Retallack’s “The Poethical Wager” challenges writers to explore ethically and responsibly. In this way, Refractions considers how Thousand might hold their own space, agency, and limitless potential to pursue a Queer Poethics.
- ItemOpen AccessSpirits in the Gutters: The British Invasion and the Haunting of the Twentieth Century(2023-01-27) Sewel, Tom; Beaty, Bart; Xie, Shaobo; Lai, Larissa; Mason, Derritt; Murray, Chris; Beaty, BartIn this dissertation, I analyze the significant artistic and literary shifts initiated in mainstream US superhero comics by the British Invasion authors Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis (among others), and argue that their restless curiosity in exploring how the comics page can come to make meaning is part of a tradition of literary production whose roots run back through the disruptive US/UK modernisms of the early twentieth century, the fragmented spiritual affects of Romanticism, and the dissonant overcomplications of Baroque art. I argue that that the impact of this group of writers instigated a sea change of generational proportions in the direction of American comics writing from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. This change began with an increased focus on textuality and the tropes of literary storytelling (such as unreliable narrators, non-linear narratives, and biting political allegory) but was always accompanied by and generative of an innovative and experimental approach to the mechanics of visual storytelling in terms of the manipulation of layouts, panelling, guttering, and other concrete elements of the comics page. US superhero comics written and illustrated by US creators published subsequent to the British Invasion and up to the present day, continue to reflect the deep shifts in aesthetic and literary preoccupations inaugurated by the authors of the British Invasion, with Moore, Morrison, and Ellis chief among them. At stake in this sea change is the figure of the unreconstructed, all-American superhero as a symbol of hope, justice, morality, and honour. I argue that the British Invasion authors brought a critical, intellectualized cynicism to their own superhero writing, which worked to create and sustain new audiences of more mature comics readers whose taste for overtly political or philosophical comics remains a powerful market force in the comics industry today. The Invasion writers changed the way that stories could be told in superhero comics, and while they may not have been successful in recouping the radical potential of the superhero as a figure of collective liberation, they heralded an enduring shift in the kinds of stories that mainstream comics were allowed to tell.
- ItemOpen AccessThe Virtual Child, or Six Provocations on Children’s Literature and (Pre-) Digital Culture(John's Hopkins University Press, 2021-01) Mason, DerrittAnxieties about children and the virtual might feel unique to the digital age, but as this essay clarifies, a longer, pre-digital history of “the virtual child” demonstrates that the child itself has long been “virtual,” not merely—and only recently—confronted by the perils of virtual space. Such a history illuminates the peculiarity of our current cultural moment, wherein worries about the digital virtual collide with the child’s enduring construction (by adults) as a virtual being that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both promising and threatening. Children’s literature often aims to instill virtue, or moral quality, in the child, while mapping and regulating their Virtù, or power, creativity, and possible lack of morality. The child’s virtuality has been the subject of adult concern for centuries, such that worried attempts to manage the child’s virtuality end up producing virtual spaces for this management to take place. Frequently, these virtual spaces take shape inside imperialist narratives of colonial exploitation that assign distinctly gendered tasks to its participants, grooming them for heterosexual adulthood. Such narratives survive today, yielding not only apprehensions about and hopes for the virtual child in a digital era, but also new forms of resistance to these enduring conventions.
- ItemOpen AccessVIRTuE(2023-09-13) Williamson, Emma Victoria; Mason, Derritt; Whitehead, Joshua; Aycock, JohnVIRTuE is a visual novel developed in the software Ren’Py, the plot of which follows Vi, a “twenty-something” lesbian who has recently graduated from college, but who has now found herself unemployed, directionless, and facing mounting pressure from her parents to actually do something with her life. The story escalates, however, when a love poem Vi writes gains public attention after becoming a runner-up in a queer writing contest, and this newfound “success” leads her into a downward spiral of stress and anxiety. At its core, VIRTuE explores the pressures placed upon queer people by various “normativities” within our lives — from heteronormativity, to homonormativity, to chrononormativity — and the ways that attempting to mold oneself to fit into these normativities is inevitably a process of compromising one’s own queer identity. Throughout the game, Vi faces pressures to alter both herself and her work to avoid (both real and perceived) social rejection in a heteronormative world, illustrating the realities of life as a queer artist, but also simply as a young queer adult attempting to find one’s way in the world. As a protagonist, however, Vi also serves the purpose of challenging homonormativity, as she is intentionally written to be awkward, frustrating, and only dubiously likeable, thus deviating from media depictions of queer characters which may be “sanitized” for straight audiences and thus deprived of the opportunity to be controversial, messy, or otherwise truly queer. VIRTuE is also accompanied by a critical exegesis, “Boring Gay People: Homonormativity vs. the Queer Games Avant-Garde,” which further expands on the exploration of homonormativity in the game, and also details the significance of the project being specifically a video game. Toward the latter, the exegesis highlights the growing community of queer game developers within the “queer games avant-garde” who are changing the face of both art and gaming, and explores the unique potential held by games as a storytelling medium, including the ways that VIRTuE’s story is enhanced by being told through a game.