USB Journals (Univ. Köln)
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Mobile Games im Deutschunterricht - literarisches Lernen und mediale Partizipation durch die Reflexion von Pay-to-Win-Spielmechaniken
No full textDer Beitrag differenziert das Feld der Computerspieldidaktik für den didaktischen Umgang mit (Casual) Mobile Games (Smartphone-/Tabletspiele) im Deutschunterricht aus. Dabei wird der Blick auf Free-to-play-Mobile-Games (F2P) mit Pay-to-Win-Spielmechaniken (P2W) gelegt. Diese Spiele sind nicht auf das Durch-, sondern Weiterspielen ausgelegt. Sie fordern ab bestimmten Spielständen Echtgeld für den schnelleren und/oder leichteren Fortschritt. Die Spielmechanik wirkt damit auf die Narration ein, um Spieler*innen zu binden. Unter Einbezug eines kulturwissenschaftlichen und eines ludisch-orientierten Strukturmodells wird ein erprobter Unterrichtsimpuls vorgestellt. Im Beitrag steht das medienreflexive Lernen im Zentrum, um die Ausbildung von medialer Partizipation im Deutschunterricht zu perspektivieren.
The article differentiates the field for the didactic use of (casual) mobile games (mobile/tablet games) in German lessons. The focus is on free-to-play mobile games (F2P) with Pay-to-Win game mechanics (P2W). These games are not designed to be played through – but to be played on. From certain game levels, they require real money for faster and/or easier progress. The game mechanics thus influence the narrative in order to bind players. One tried and tested teaching concept is presented, taking into account a cultural study and a ludology-orientated structural model. The article focuses on media-reflective learning in order to give perspective to the development of me-dial participation in German lessons.In German didactics, computer games are already being discussed for use in lessons. The article differentiates the field for the didactic use of casual games/mobile games in German lessons for German computer game didactics. The focus is on free-to-play mobile games (F2P) with pay-to-win computer game mechanics (P2W). These free games are strategically designed with game mechanics so that they should not end and, at certain levels, require real money for faster and/or easier progress. The mechanics thus have a strategic effect on the narrative in order to (economically) bind the players. Using a ludology-oriented structural model, two tried-and-tested integrative didactic teaching concepts are presented using the example of in-game currencies and loot boxes. Loot boxes are a kind of digital grab bag that are controlled by an algorithm to obtain items or similar in-game content. You are paid through in-game currencies. The overall focus of the article is on the integrative connection between integrative-didactic and media-reflective learning in order to holistically perspective the development of media participatory in competency-oriented German lessons
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
Heading into its fifth year, gender forum’s Early Career Researchers issue has now become an established place for insightful new research. This year’s issue presents the format’s trademark broad range of interest, showcasing new research that deals with material as diverse as song lyrics, stage plays, performance art, biography, and finally, online forums
Review: Joe and the ‘Real’ Girls: Blade Runner 2049
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
About halfway into Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Officer K (Ryan Gosling) finds himself seeking the source of a wooden and quite literal Trojan horse that, he has been told, originates from a hotbed of radioactivity. K sends his drone-like camera into the vaporous twilight to find the locus of contamination. Constantly moving and re-centering simultaneously, the viewfinder reveals the first of numerous and giant sculpted women littering the Vegas wasteland. A “heat analysis” reveals “life” collecting in a tangerine puddle at the fingertips of her delicately carved hand. The digital equivalent of these deserted Galateas, K’s fembot companion Joi (Ana de Armas) responds, “what is it?” to which K retorts, “guess we’re about to find out.” Like life itself, both this question and the film’s very quest are of woman (figure) born
Review: 13 Reasons Why
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review:
While apprehensively preparing to listen to his own tape, Clay Jensen asks his best friend, Tony, the pivotal question presented throughout Brain Yorkey’s 13 Reasons Why: “Did I kill Hannah Baker?” (“Tape 5, Side B”). The answer to this question is never blatantly stated in the series. However, the series regularly implies, as Alex Standall suggests, that “we all killed Hannah Baker” (Tape 2, Side A). As a show depicting the horrific consequences of slut-shaming, bullying, sexual assault, and the ineptitude of mental health awareness, 13 Reasons Why provides an interesting commentary concerning the hardships many young women face in a sexist high school environment and delineates such strains as a catalyst for adolescent suicide. Based on Jay Asher’s best-selling novel of the same name, the series begins in the wake of Hannah Baker’s completed suicide. While much of the school is struggling to comprehend the motivations behind the tragic event, Clay mysteriously receives a box of cassette tapes on his front porch that Hannah recorded prior to her death. The cassettes, each addressed to a different classmate, delineate the thirteen reasons Hannah took her own life and ultimately reveal the truth behind various rumors spread to defame her character. The show thus takes the form of a mystery, as Clay becomes an avenging detective gradually uncovering the motivations behind Hannah’s suicide while simultaneously revealing his classmates’ transgressions and finally his own
“Raging Bull:” Contesting Masculinity in Joyce Carol Oates’ A Book of American Martyrs (2017)
No full textDawn Dunphy in Joyce Carol Oates’ 2017 novel A Book of American Martyrs is used to women’s bodies being controlled and defined by men: she has grown up with an image of female sexuality as impure and contemptible, and as a teenager she has been raped by a gang of schoolboys. However, Dawn is not simply a victim, but from her early teenage years struggles to regain control over her life and body. In fact, her rape provides a cathartic moment for her: she rejects stigmatization and takes violent revenge on her rapists. Driven by the wish to fight men, her hammer-wielding vengeance leads Dawn to go into women’s boxing – where, however, she immediately finds herself the object of male assessment again, as female boxers have to play certain, sexualized roles for the eyes of the predominantly male audience.
Female masculinity, my essay will argue, provides the means for Dawn to reject male claims of control over the female body: through her performance as a boxer, Dawn challenges notions of femininity and masculinity and lays claim to an almost gender-neutral identity. She chooses a new, gender-neutral name, D.D., and in an echo of her rape revenge she picks the boxing name “Hammer of Jesus.” What is more, D.D. refuses external ascriptions and to don the sexualizing attire other female boxers wear. Instead, through representation of her body by means of clothes, tattoos, and hairstyle she uses the body itself as a marker of power, to “transform mechanisms of masculinity and produce new constellations of embodiment, power, and desire” (Halberstam 276). The disgusted and negative reactions of the men around her show how successful her attempt at defying notions of gender indeed is. Thus, female masculinity becomes the means for D.D. to reassert control over her own body by rejecting the objectifying male gaze. She challenges masculine power by messing up what masculinity means and who has a claim to it: “The boxing ring, obviously, has become the arena for the most public contests over the meaning of masculinity and its relation to male embodiment” (Halberstam 272)
The Power and Subjection of Liminality and Borderlands of Non-Binary Folx
No full textThis essay explores Victor Turner’s liminal spaces and Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands and how these spaces contain components of power that include the potentiality of liminal space, the access to knowledge and knowing, freedom from social constructs, and multiple subjectivities. By existing in an unintelligible state, folx who hold non-binary gender identities function within liminal spaces. Components found in liminal spaces and borderlands allow non-binary folx to possess a power that is not accessible to those confined within the structured gender binary. For this essay, I will utilize the term non-binary to refer to people who place themselves, or are forcibly placed, outside of the gender binary. I am using non-binary folx because I view this as an umbrella term that includes all of the above-mentioned labels, as non-binary implies functioning outside of the gender binary. Moreover, folx incorporates the x that is being widely used to bring in more identities to conversations, such as womxn, latinx, and alumx to name a few. While investigating the power that exists within liminal spaces and borderlands, the struggles that non-binary folx face are also explored. A search for home, an inability to enter into defined spaces, and lack of access to systems are some of the complexities that exist within these liminal spaces. These borderlands are sites of potential invisibility, misrecognition, and unintelligibility that restrict access to institutions as well as rights that are structured by the gender binary system. It is imperative that an investigation of these properties of liminal states and borderlands be done to create access to these institutions without negating the lived experiences of non-binary folx by forcing their classification within the gender binary
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
The question of “What even is the Anthropocene?” is oddly open and self-deferring, which is even further complicated yet significantly expanded by a cultural tendency to neologize around the -cene: Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chtuhlucene (Haraway), Anthrobscene (Parikka), Mediocene (Engell and Siegert), Black Anthropocene(s) (Yusoff), just to mention a few. New feminist materialisms are emerging at a time in need for alternative visions of the world threatened by human exceptionalism, ecological terror(ism), and devastating, extinction-fostering capital flows: they pose the question of how to theorize and practice ethical and decidedly posthuman and non-anthropocentric feminisms in the geological era of the (late capitalist) Anthropocene. What is at stake here, is a new awareness of the ontological relationality of always-already non-individual bodies and the potential for entangled agencies in an age of looming planetary crisis; what Joanna Zylinska theorizes as a minimal ethics of distributing rather than rehumanizing responsibility (also see Pulsifer’s article in this issue). This is directly linked to shedding light on the affectivity of matter and varieties of nonhuman agents/actants, to use Latourian terms, in processes of gendering and racialization, or the emergence of the body and social bodies as affective human-nonhuman assemblages: this can be the starting point for new –isms, as well as new politics of feminist intervention, calling attention to a shared yet stratified nonhuman condition and Anthropocene
The Quiet Queer: Coming Out & Queer Fabrications
No full textThe remnants of bourgeois consciousness maintain a split between the private sphere and public sphere, despite the ongoing mass privatization of all things in what Mark Fisher calls “business ontology” in Capitalist Realism. This proliferation of supposed borders between an interior world and an exterior world maintain the “in” and “out” of a conceptual closet from which one can come out. But coming out is not a universal or universalizing part of the queer experience: not throughout the globe, and not even in America. But how is it that somebody is generally not held up as “really queer” unless they’ve come out? Who gets to come out? Who doesn’t have to? Who doesn’t have the privilege to do so? And how does the fact that coming out never really ends insofar as coming out to new colleagues and friends and romantic partners is a perpetual process? Scholars like Jasbir Puar in Terrorist Assemblages and Chandan Reddy in Freedom with Violence reject the alleged hyper-immediate “outlaw” status of the homosexual subject by lamenting its militaristic deployment and its rearticulation into heterosexual terms, rendering it something palatable to the masses and exceptional only in its banal marketability. Other scholars, like Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in “Sex in Public”, still uphold the reign of heteronormativity. This article will examine the “magical” and revelatory properties of the speech act of coming out, as well as the structures demanding that those with big profiles come out, by looking at celebrity queer culture, fandom, and queer icons to interrogate why some are expected to come out, ultimately reifying the coming out process. The article will also examine the ways that the coming out process actually supports the reign of heteronormativity by placing regulations on the interpellation of queer identity
Frontmatter and Editorial
No full textIn lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:
For the seventh time this special issue of gender forum provides a platform for early career researchers in the field. The articles selected for the 2019 ECR issue focus on hegemonic systems of power, sex positivity and queerness, as well as notions of gendered identity
Women on Twitch Turkey: Affective Communities and Female Solidarity Under Patriarchy and Postfeminism
No full textThis article examines the experiences of female streamers and podcasters on Twitch Turkey primarily through in-depth interviews conducted with 35 respondents. Despite the platform’s growth as one of the most widely visited social media sites and the biggest online game streaming platform, there is limited research as to how gender identities and geographical location shape streamers’ experiences and usage of the platform. We argue that female streamer’s use of Twitch Turkey is marked by combined patriarchal pressures and neoliberal, postfeminist thrust for aggressive competitiveness. Sexual harassment is the major problem for women, and pervasive patriarchal relations of domination affect all female streamers’ usage of the platform, who often find themselves scrutinized and criticized for their body images, clothing, and gaming performances. In exerting control over their behavior, patriarchy, however, affects women in different ways based on their cultural preferences and personal habits. We also argue that Twitch Turkey tends to push women to adopt postfeminist subjectivities to rigorously compete with each other for limited viewership, sponsorship, and income opportunities. However, these pressures and constraints are resisted and re-negotiated especially through the formation of female solidarities and affective communities in online streaming