'Queering Game Studies' course at UT Arlington seeks to create 'emancipated players'
The University of Texas at Arlington is offering a class this semester called 'Queer Game Studies: Cultivating the Emancipated Player.'
Required readings include 'Gay Men's Revenge,' 'The Monster and the Homosexual,' and 'Queering Linearity in Final Fantasy XIII.'
A school in the University of Texas System appears to be enticing students to embrace LGBT ideology with a course on video games.
The University of Texas at Arlington is offering a class this semester called “Queer Game Studies: Cultivating the Emancipated Player.” This course will discuss how video games have had an impact on “queer people” while influencing culture to be more “inclusive”.
Offered by the Gender, Woman, and Sexuality Studies Program (GWSS), the course provides credit hours towards an English degree or a GWSS degree.
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A course description states that those enrolled “will investigate the place of queerness in gaming, including the representation of characters and methods of resistance to game constructs.”
The class also aims to help students understand the “cultural discourse surrounding queerness.” The main goal as stated in the description is to create “emanicipated [sic] players that will be equipped to examine the queerness found in play.”
Some of the “required texts” for the course include video games like “Pong” (1972), “One Night Ultimate Werewolf” (2014), “Secret Hitler” (2015), and “Dead by Daylight” (2016).
The assignments students will need to complete require that they compare attitudes toward queer people from throughout history, advertising, and video games.
Homework includes watching the walkthroughs for video games and reading pieces like “Gay Men’s Revenge,” “The Monster and the Homosexual,” “Queering Linearity in Final Fantasy XIII,” and “Appetite for Disruption: The Cinematic Zombie and Queer Theory.”
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The instructor for the class is Mark S. Reeder, an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and GWSS. He is also the Assistant Director of Campus Visits and Events.
In the spring and fall semester of 2023, Reeder taught ”We are the weirdos, mister”: Queer Representation in Horror. This course communicated to students that “Queer people are also often problematized as similarly transgressive and threatening to power structures.”
Reeder explained in the syllabus that “the LGBTQ+ community … often embraces the horror genre by identifying with those Othered and disenfranchised in their stories.”
Campus Reform contacted UT Arlington for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
