Video Games Have Always Been Queer book cover

FUTURE READS: FRI's Feminist Book Club

By Anna Ward

Read on for our #FeministFutures book club recommendations. And share your thoughts on these readings with us at fri@ucdavis.edu.

Bonnie Ruberg's Video Games Have Always Been Queer (NYU Press, 2019) 

https://nyupress.org/9781479843749/

Queerness and video games share a common ethos,” Ruberg argues, “the longing to imagine alternative ways of being and to make space within structures of power for resistance through play.” Rather than focusing on video games that feature explicitly coded queer content or beckon queer players, Ruberg argues for a more capacious understanding of video gaming’s queer history and possible queer futures.

Bonus recommendation: Ruberg, along with other leading scholars in the field, helped create the Oxford Bibliography on Feminist and Queer Game Studies. If you’re looking for key texts in the field, there are 150 peer-reviewed recommendations covering 15 subfields.

Dána-Ain Davis' Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (NYU Press, 2019)

https://nyupress.org/9781479853571/reproductive-injustice/

A timely examination of medical racism and the disturbingly high rates of negative birth outcomes for Black women. Deeply informed by feminist and women of color methodologies, Davis's book combines extensive ethnographic interview research with rich historical and theoretical provocations. The final chapter "Radical Black Birth Workers" and its focus on midwives, doulas, and reproductive justice advocates is a stand out. 

Recommended teaching pairing: Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Dying to be Competent” in Thick and Other Essays (2019)

Aimi Hamraie's Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability (University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/building-access

As Aimi Hamraie lays out in the book’s introductory chapter, “Building Access […] offers scholars, activists, designers, and others who support the project of accessible world-building a map of our paths to the present” and what better way to build towards feminist futures than beginning with that map in mind. This is not just a book for those specializing in disability studies or the built environment. Anyone interested in thinking through the politics of knowledge production will find Hamraie’s formulation of “access-knowledge” compelling. “Knowledge is […] a kind of design,” Hamraie explains, and “how the built world materializes is inseparable from the value-laden politics of knowing.”

Bonus recommendation: Hamraie is also the Director of the Critical Design Lab and the CDL’s Mapping Access website is a phenomenal resource for those interested in issues of access and disability justice, including the podcast Contra*. Check out Episode 3 featuring artist/scholar Kevin Gotkin on “crip nightlife”.