Josephine Baird: Role-playing Games as Transformative Spaces for Trans People to Explore, Express, and Embody Gender

Abstract

We can be whoever we want to be in role-playing games. Because they are, after all, only games. That is the opportunity that they give us to break social conventions, change the rules, and transform who we are. This dissertation, comprised of four peer-reviewed articles, examines how role-playing games provide a space for trans people to explore, express, and embody their gender.  This dissertation begins by outlining the precarious sociocultural context that most trans people live within, which establishes the need for safer spaces for them to express their gendered self, to explore what that means for them individually, and gain the experience, courage, and community required to embody that in everyday life.  Inspired by anecdotal and scholarly evidence that show that trans people do this in role-playing games, this dissertation draws on queer/trans theory, game studies, and transformative role-playing studies amongst other interdisciplinary fields, to establish how they do so. This dissertation uses (and establishes the argument for) a scavenger methodology to examine this marginalised subject in sufficient depth and nuance.  As a scavenger methodology, I deploy autoethnographic and duoethnographic methods to establish that role-playing games provide a safer container of play for gender exploration, expression, and embodiment, in a similar way to queer social and performance spaces. I demonstrate how both environments allow for a defined space separate from the wider sociocultural context, a safer social contract and rules to practice gender non-normatively, and the potential to bleed that experience from within those containers into everyday life. I posit that role-playing games, especially those played in-person, have a number of additional characteristics that make them especially useful to the exploration, expression, and embodiment of gender, particularly for trans players.  Furthermore, by considering non-formal/informal game-based learning and the therapeutic use of role-playing, I establish what can learned through exploring, expressing, and embodying gender in role-playing games. I demonstrate how live action role-playing games (larps) allow for situated/experiential learning and that the iii inclusion of educational framing activities preceding and following role-play facilitates not only learning about one’s own personal gender but also wider LGBTQIA+ culture and heritage.  Finally, I present a speculative design that puts into practice the findings outlined in the rest of the dissertation, which forms the blueprint for a game intentionally created to allow for gender exploration, expression, and embodiment, particularly for trans players.  The combined contributions this dissertation makes are therefore: 1) digital and analogue role-playing games (which are most often not designed for such a purpose) provide a safer container of transformative play for trans people to explore, express, and embody their gender; 2) LGBTQIA+ social and performance spaces create a similar safer container of transformative play; 3) these safer containers of play in both arenas allow for the exploration, expression, and embodiment of gender for trans players that can bleed out into everyday life; 4) through the scaffolding of educational role-playing game design principles, these safer containers of play allow for situated and experiential learning that goes beyond personal experience of gender; 5) roleplaying games allow for not only the retention and communication of queer heritage, but also the embodied demonstration of how queer heritage is co-created and reproduced across time and space; 6) scavenger methodology, comprised of methods like autoethnography and duoethnography, provides insight that other methods could not for marginalised queer and trans experience with games; and 7) a speculative design based on transformative role-playing game features, provides the basis for a game that is intentionally designed to allow for the exploration, expression, and embodiment of gender, particularly for trans players. I conclude this dissertation by locating these combined contributions within wider developing queer and trans game studies and outline future research to follow from my findings.