Marcia B.

@traversefantasy.itch.io

1126 Followers 409 Following

notorious girlblogger 💁‍♀️ freudomarxist 🚩 ongoing projects: #cinco 🏴‍☠️ #resourciv 🏛️ blog: https://traversefantasy.blogspot.com/ itch: https://traversefantasy.itch.io/

For the purposes of statements like "You shouldn't base your understanding of queer politics purely on what you've experienced online," Seattle counts as online.
Is D&D a metaphor for phallic desire, or is phallic desire something which operates on the same logic as D&D? Obviously, if phallic desire in the strictest sense (i.e. of erotics) were considered a basis of D&D, it would have to be alongside other social systems such as capitalism and racism whose symbolic structures permeate all aspects of social and personal fantasy. Yet at the same time, sexism or patriarchy do not exist on a lower level than these other factors, not only in existing beside them but also informing the language we use to discuss them, as we have seen in how colonial language evokes patriarchal symbolism in order to justify some aspects of colonial conquest. These systems all interact with and often reinforce each other if deemed beneficial, so better understanding one helps understand the language and logic of another. The political is erotic just as the erotic is political, and D&D is not exempt from the social implications of phallic discourse even if it is not unique or as explicit in encoding them (though, with characters being lords and patriarchs, and with dungeons inhabited by “scantily clad” medusae, how could it not be explicit?). Rather, if Gygax’s comments are to be taken seriously, or if the literary or social conventions behind D&D are to be explored, D&D is as much a male sexist fantasy as it is a racist or a capitalist one. Yet these fantasies, being so prevalent in society, are difficult to escape even for the people they target. They cannot be bypassed by just calling for more female adventurers, for example. They are features of the dungeon game insofar as the latter is an expression of all those real-life symbolic systems.
There’s a professor at my partner’s graduate school who’s very eager to catch students in the act of academic dishonesty. The class is split up into small groups to write and present a review article of publications in the field. Like clockwork, every year, the students who write the actual data summary for their respective groups’ projects get called to his office to beg for academic probation (as opposed to expulsion). Why? Because their portions of the project have undeniable similarities to published works as detected by the professor’s anti-plagiarism software.
tweet: my neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so i asked how many cats he has and he says he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so i said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started to cry