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The Rendered Body: Queer Utopian Thinking in Digital Embodiment

The rendered body is pure possibility, but it has been treated with an imaginatively limited lens that belies its potential for radical reimagining. I want to challenge those imaginative limits, especially in regard to gender and how gender is read on digital bodies. In order to do this, I will draw on video games studies’ rich field of avatar and body theory, queer theory’s concepts of gender instability and failure, animation’s tools of abstraction and imagination, and sf studies’ figuring of radical possibility.

Alison Lanier
Written by
Alison Lanier

Alison Lanier is a Cambridge-based writer and editor who specializes in media studies with an emphasis on queer theory and narrative. She studied film at Wellesley College and received her MFA in fiction from University of Massachusetts Boston. Her current studies focus on media theory through video games, with a focus on how bodies are conceptualized and rendered within digital spaces. She is interested in exploring how gender can be both portrayed and disrupted through gaming contexts and imagined characters. Her previous scholarship was rooted in aesthetic philosophy, with a focus on street arts and ephemerality, as well as narrative theory.

She is one of the founding editors of Mortar Magazine and assists at AGNI Magazine; she served as film editor at Atticus Review as well as a regular columnist. Her reviews and essays appear at Ms. Magazine, Bitch, The Critical Flame, and elsewhere.

Outside of work and school, she reads too many Batman comics, practices book conservation, and spoils her cats.

Alison Lanier Written by Alison Lanier