Researching

My primary areas of research include video games, digital rhetorics and digital humanities, race, gender, and sexuality studies, popular culture, and 20C/21C American literature, particularly speculative literature of color.  My theoretical frameworks are purposefully interdisciplinary drawing on intersectional queer theory, feminist media studies, and its relation to technocultural studies.  Although my background and training are in English and literature, my research includes speculative literature and media of color, games (both analog and digital), writing and pedagogy, and everyday culture to address the normative and radical intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and technology. 

My current projects include revising and reorganizing my dissertation entitled Technoqueer: Re/con/figuring Posthuman Narratives to produce two, consecutive book projects over the next three years.  Looking at games like Bioware’s Dragon Age series, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, and indie games like Fullbright’s Gone Home and Merritt Kopas’s Lim, the current book “close plays” video games and queerness and provokes whether or not it is possible to design a queer game in a binary-based medium.  The book is tentatively titled Playing Queer: Video Games and Technonormativity and considers the affordances and limitations the digital medium—from platform to programming to narrative to play—which is constrained by the tyranny of the binary, the Boolean, and what Alexander Galloway defines as the “proscription for structure” or protocol.  Given this regulation of gamespace, the project thinks about ways to play games and make games that challenge or disrupt the technonormativity of the digital to allow for queer possibilities.  Queer game studies and critical queerness in game play, design, and scholarship must be intersectional and “procedurally relevant” to attend to the ways interface, mechanics, code, and platform are highly regulated, structured, and normative formations.  My project ends with how might we imagine queergaming, ways of playing against the grain, against normative design, and ways of designing gamic experiences that foreground not only alternative narrative opportunities but ludic ones as well. 

The second book project addresses the intersections of queer and technology to intervene in posthuman narratives of self-fashioning and control.  I am particularly interested in the intersections of Afrofuturism, Asianfuturism, and Indigenous Futurisms as imagined through science fictions and digital games of color.  Given popular narratives and rhetorics of digital and virtual technologies liberating humanity from the prison of the “meat,” the book project deploys a comparative study of literature, video games, and body modification technologies in order to articulate alternative readings of technologically-mediated race, gender, and sexuality foreclosed or overlooked by contemporary posthumanism.  Drawing on queer of color and games of color critique, my project addresses the intersections of queer and technology to intervene in narratives of posthumanism.  The second project defines the “technoqueer” as a way to understand the co-constitutive relation of technology to sexuality, gender, race, and ability.  Drawing on authors like Octavia E. Butler, Larissa Lai, Samuel Delany, Ted Chiang, and the queer games by Robert Yang, I show how technology is never neutral to theorize alternative futurities and embrace technoqueer worldmaking, what José Esteban Muñoz’s names “productive utopias.” 

Beyond the book-length projects, I aim to continue to publish both academic and public scholarship, pivoting toward Asian American studies and ethnic futurisms, and to establish myself as a creative writer and maker.  My research directly informs my teaching, service, community engagement, and creative work.  For example, I have recently worked with the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle to develop a range of exhibitions on Asian American games, science fiction, and most recently, beauty; I have taught courses on live-action role-playing games using a rule system I created called Archaea; and I am developing my own games, media, and exploring opportunities to publish creatively as a queer writer of color.  My courses, presentations, and workshops explore ways to engage humanities-based approaches to digital technologies, games, and everyday culture through feminist and queer lenses.  Specifically, I believe in challenging the widely-accepted notion of “digital natives,” addressing race, gender, sexuality, and other difference in digital cultures, thinking about low tech, high tech, and tech-appropriate integration, and about developing a teaching philosophy of technology.  Long-range projects include developing an edited collection on games of color, (co-)organizing an in-person national conference, perhaps Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) , developing a “distributed” center for queer and intersectional video game studies, and to keep celebrating, supporting, and protecting diversity and inclusion in scholarship, universities, and beyond.