Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Popular Fantasy

This book explores the ways in which contemporary writers, artists, directors, producers and fans use the opportunities offered by popular fantasy to exceed or challenge norms of gender and sexuality, focusing on a range of media, including television episodes and series, films, video games and multi-player online role-play games, novels and short stories, comics, manga and graphic novels, and board games. Engaging directly with an enormously successful popular genre which is often overlooked by literary and cultural criticism, contributors pay close attention to the ways in which the producers of fantasy texts, whether visual, game, cinematic, graphic or literary texts, are able to play with gender and sexuality, to challenge and disrupt received notions and to allow and encourage their audiences to imagine ways of being outside of the constitutive constraints of socialized gender and sexual identity. With rich case studies from the US, Australia, UK, Japan and Europe, all concentrating not on the critique of fantasy texts which duplicate or reinforce existing prejudices about gender and sexuality, but on examining the exploration of or attempt to make possible non-normative gendered and sexual identities, this volume will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities, with interests in popular culture, fantasy, media studies and gender and sexualities.

Jude Roberts is a researcher in gender and sexualities in contemporary popular cultures and a Teaching Fellow in English at Keele University, UK. She has published research on gender and sexual minorities, science fiction and fantasy, censorship, obscenity and critical theory and is currently completing a monograph titled Contemporary Pornographic Comics and the Politics of Sexual Representation.
Esther MacCallum-Stewart is Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Centre of the University of the West of England, UK. She writes widely on player narratives in video games, sex, love and gender in games, and role-playing practices, as well as running gaming conventions and promoting inclusion in fandom. She is editor of Playing with Affection: The Game Love Reader and author of Players Vs Games: Online Communities, Social Narratives.