the heart is not a tv dinner

–from Sarah Schulman’s preface to the 1999 edition of her 1986 novel Girls, Visions and Everything
Though I lament the idea that the hostility and obliviousness of the world may be timeless, as a romantic queer woman with big dreams making my way in a world that’s sometimes hostile to me and often oblivious to things that seem perfectly obvious to me, I was heartened to see these words greet me when I started in on Schulman’s book today.
An example of obliviousness: on a recent piece I wrote for work in which I praised a game for the monumental act of simply portraying a relationship between women who aren’t presented as sex objects and who matter as individuals, in and of themselves and because of what they mean to each other and not just in relation to a male figure, one commenter said that games should be something we do to escape from such political agendas. I can read a lot of ignorant or hostile shit and not be fazed by it but comments like this sometimes knock the wind right out of me. How is it that so many people out there still don’t know that games are political, that Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda and Call of Duty all support and reinforce certain dominant ideologies? Because for so many players, so long as the worldview a game endorses meshes with his own, it’s invisible to him. Only when a game challenges his perspective does he become aware of its political meanings. For him, the status quo is simply the natural order of things. To challenge it is to have an agenda–I’m so often accused of having an agenda. If hoping to do my part (along with many others) to make the political meanings of games a more significant part of the larger cultural discussion about games, and feeling like those games that challenge the patriarchal worldview reinforced by the colossal majority of games should be championed for doing so constitutes an agenda, then yes, I have one. But then, almost every game also has an agenda.

–from the preface to the 1999 edition of Girls, Visions and Everything
What Schulman says here about stretching to universalize Kerouac but the dominant-culture reader not stretching to universalize her loudly echoes for me the way that many male players say that they don’t want to play as female characters in games because they cannot relate to or feel connected to such characters. Meanwhile, women who play games have been identifying closely with male characters for decades; games have often left us little choice. Yet still there are those who insist that games shouldn’t be. and by and large are not, political.
And as for what I said earlier about being romantic…



–from Masha Tupitsyn’s book Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film.
What is sadder, to give up on love or to keep believing in it? Me, I’m a believer. But I know that illusions of love can undermine the real thing, that real love takes work. “What we put between us, we can remove.”
Notes
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hips-like-battleships said: the other flip side of course (though the personal is the political, etc.) is that really, two women who have meaning outside of a man isn’t really politics at all–it’s real life, yours and mine. but because it’s not his experience, he dismisses.
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