For informal discussions, sharing work and community support, consider joining our network of folks interested in queer perspectives on game audio.
We welcome anyone who wishes to engage with game audio from a queer perspective. To join, please contact tim [dot] summers [at] rhul [dot] ac [dot] uk telling us your name and areas of interest.
We welcome those identifying under the LGBTQ+ umbrella and allies. On this page, you can find some brief information and resources. For more interactive discussion use the contact above to join our private discussion channel and mailing list.
Discussions and Plans
We plan to hold semi-regular sessions where we share work and discuss a piece of queer theory in the context of game sound. In our first session on 16th August, we plan to discuss Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism (2020) in the context of game audio. We also aim to schedule a symposium and methods workshops. Watch this space…!
Some Places to Start…
There is very little scholarship that pertains to queer studies and game audio. Here is a starter bibliography, but we hope it will grow. Please give us suggestions to add!
On music and queerness in games:
- Summers, Tim, The Queerness of Video Game Music [Cambridge Element] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).
On music and queerness in Gone Home:
- Synder, Shane, “The Impossible Relationship: Deconstructing the Private Space in Gone Home’, Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds 10 (2018): 7–20.
- Tulloch, Rowan, Catherine Hoad and Helen Young, “Riot Grrrl Gaming,” Continuum, 33 (2019): 337–350.
On gender and sexuality in game music in the context of animation:
- Chapters by Karen M. Cook, T.J. Laws-Nicola and Brent Ferguson, Dana Plank and Ko On Chan in The Intersection of Animation, Video Games, and Music, edited by Lisa Scoggin and Dana Plank. New York: Routledge, 79–132. Karen M. Cook’s chapter on Xandir P. Wifflebottom explicily deals with queer themes.
On gender coding:
- Austin, Michael, “Orchestrating Difference: Representing Gender in Video Game Music.” In Masculinity at Play, edited by Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018): 165–183.
- Meléndez, Elisa, “For Those About to Rock: Gender Codes in the Rock Music Video Games Rock Band And Rocksmith,” PhD diss., Florida International University, 2018.
- Mera, Miguel, “Invention/Re-Invention,” Music, Sound and the Moving Image 3, no. 1 (2009): 1–20.
- Yee, Thomas B. “Feminine Themings: The Construction of Musical Gendering in the Final Fantasy Franchise” in The Music of Nobuo Uematsu in the Final Fantasy Series, edited by Richard Anatone (Bristol: Intellect, 2022): 261–290.
Broad ideas of game music, gender and identity:
- Cheng, William, Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Chapter 5 on voice and identity in online games.
- Rietveld, Hillegonda C., and Andrew Lemon, “Female Credit: Excavating Recognition for the Capcom Sound Team,” in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 376–388.
- Tonelli, Chris, “Game Music and Identity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Video Game Music, edited by Melanie Fritsch and Tim Summers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 327–342.
On music, dance and gender in Dance Central:
- Miller, Kiri, Playable Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017) and “Gaming the System: Gender Performance in Dance Central”, New Media & Society 17 (2015): 829–1003.