Jess Wind will be defending their PhD dissertation proposal at 11:00AM Pacific Time on Friday, July 15. The presentation will take place online via Zoom.
All are welcome to attend.
Join Zoom Meeting (please arrive 5 minutes early)
Meeting ID: 641 7049 0672
Passcode: 989374
Supervisor: Dr. Jennifer Jenson
Committee Members: Dr. Derek Gladwin (LLED); Dr. Janice Stewart (GRSJ)
Title: Making it work: Examining discourses of labour, gender, and unnamed whiteness in D&D’s homebrew creator community
Abstract:
Dungeons and Dragons, a fifty-year-old tabletop fantasy role playing game has been steadily growing in popularity since the release of the fifth edition in 2014. Mainstream discourse suggests that D&D publishers Wizards of the Coast have made strides to distance current commercial publications from the game’s sexist and racialized, Tolkien-era origins, with each new edition (McGrane, 2018; Mendez-Hodes 2019), but critics argue D&D continues to fail to challenge racist logic in the foundation of the game (Young, 2018), one that I argue is reproduced through an active fan-creator community which modifies and extends those rules. My research takes up the unexplored culture of “homebrew” content creation, examining how its contributors impact D&D’s cultural economy and community, and importantly, how homebrew creators engage with and navigate discourses of race and marginalization.
Specifically, my dissertation project asks who makes, publishes, and sells their D&D homebrew content? How do creators discuss their paid/unpaid work and the creative labour environments in which they participate? How are discourses of power, race, colonization, gender, and other socio-political inequities constituted and navigated in D&D fan-creator communities? To address these questions, I apply critical discourse analysis in an examination of publicly available social media and forum discussions centred around Wizard’s approach to anti-racist gaming, and how that discourse is taken up by homebrew creators on Twitter and Reddit. I will also conduct focus groups and interviews with homebrew content creators to discuss labour and diversity in fan-created D&D content. I do this through an anti-oppressive methodological framework drawing on anti-racist, decolonial, and postmodern feminist approaches. With this project, I am designing qualitative research that is committed to anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer and feminist explorations into representation and cultural engagement with media texts. This means engaging in critical self-reflexivity at every stage of the research, and working with methods based in reciprocity toward the D&D homebrew community.
By examining homebrew content as a legitimate extension of D&D’s transmediated franchise, and by positioning its creators within the wider D&D labour economy, my project examines discourses of power and unnamed whiteness, and inclusion and diversity in the D&D player community and the broader fan-cultural media landscape.