Queering Virtual Reality: Playful Exploration of Gender and Sexual Binaries

• In Event: 66.086 - MTCC Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: 66.086-5 - Agency, Interests, and Identity

Abstract

We investigate how virtual reality (VR) can support the development of critical literacies about gender and sexuality through playful, active inquiry. Our work is concerned with disrupting the assumed “naturalness” of male/female binary categories at the center of LGBTIQ panics in public education. We present a study of a small group of friends with gender nonconforming and queer identities and life-histories who interacted in VR-based environments by creating 3D sculptures of personally meaningful objects and creating their VR avatars in VR-based social media platforms. We show how such experiences can be productively analyzed using social constructivist perspectives that situate knowing as boundary play and figured worlds, and how such experiences may contribute to supporting critical epistemologies of gender and sexuality.

Authors

• Dylan Paré, University of Calgary

• Pratim Sengupta, University of Calgary