[csaa-forum] ACS Virtual Lecture Series talk, March 19: Poppy Wilde – Posthumanism and play: Embodying avatar-gamer entanglements

[Timothy Laurie]

**Apologies for cross-posting**

Dear colleagues,

The Association for Cultural Studies (ACS) welcomes you to an upcoming talk in its Virtual Lecture Series, by Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University, UK), titled ‘Posthumanism and play: Embodying avatar-gamer entanglements‘ (followed by a Q&A), which will take place on March 19th, 5 PM GMT (more information underneath).

For more information on the Virtual Lecture Series and upcoming talks, please visit: https://www.cultstud.org/wordpress/virtual-lecture-series/



Poppy Wilde (Birmingham City University, UK) – Posthumanism and play: Embodying avatar-gamer entanglements
March 19th, 2024
5 PM GMT

Abstract: Posthuman subjectivity suggests a condition of emergence, intra-acting with other entities, understanding our subjectivity and our actions as contingent and entirely dependent on what is around us. Where “interaction” suggests two distinct entities engaging with one another, Barad’s (2007) notion of intra-action explores the ways in which we are not ontologically distinct subjects (as the concept of “inter”action might suggest) but are bound up in our relations to everything around us. Intra-action serves as a revision of interaction to account for the ways in which distinct agencies emerge only from those engagements with “others”. In order to research how posthuman subjectivity emerges and is experienced in more depth, my research utilises the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) avatar-gamer relationship as a rich and complex example of an everyday posthuman subjectivity, to demonstrate the posthumanising of commonplace practices and affects.

The blurring between avatar and gamer has been explored extensively (e.g. Banks and Bowman 2016; Gee 2008; Filiciak 2003; Sundén 2012) and player experiences vary between seeing the avatar as a “tool” for navigation (Collins 2011); as “characters” to empathise with (Belman and Flanagan 2010); as an “ideal self” (Jin 2011); or as a “representation” of the gamer’s identity in the gameworld (Filiciak 2003: 97; Cerra and James 2012: 168). However, many of these analyses are grounded in a traditional humanist and anthropocentric approach. My research instead explores the avatar-gamer as an example of posthuman subjectivity, where avatar and gamer are entangled in multiple embodied and affective ways. Drawing on a posthuman autoethnography, which specifically troubles the notion of self and the “I”, this presentation utilises fieldnotes from playing the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft with my avatar, Etyme. Here, “I” becomes indicative and performative of a subjectivity wherein different entities intra-act (Barad 2007). Using analytic categories including performance, empathy, nostalgia, and death, I demonstrate how the gamer is in no more control of the avatar than the avatar is of the gamer. This view uses feminist, critical posthumanism to demonstrate how avatar and gamer are not ontologically distinct, but perform through distributed agency and networked affect, negotiated through cultural and societal understandings of self and selfhood.

Bio: Dr Poppy Wilde is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication in the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research (BCMCR) at Birmingham City University (BCU). She is author of Posthuman Gaming: Avatars, Gamers, and Entangled Subjectivities (Routledge 2023), and co-editor of Working Women on Screen: Paid Labour and Fourth Wave Feminism (Palgrave 2024). Her work focuses on what it means and how it feels to be posthuman, by exploring how posthuman subjectivities are enabled and embodied. Her research projects explore critical posthumanism in a variety of media contexts, through gaming, zombie studies, makeover television, music artists, and affective methodologies. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3334-059X



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