Representations of Gender in Video Games /departure talk

Event Details

SUBOTRON arcademy

Prof. em. Dr. Uta Brandes
international Gender Design Network, Cologne

We are body, we have a body, we may own a body. And this body as well as its image can be distorted, rearranged, blurred. This applies to both the body of flesh and blood and the virtual one. The idea of a natural body of humans is as obsolete as it is for a virtual body, an avatar or cyborg.
Prof. Brandes will position her long-term research on gender in design and its still highly stereotypical ideology of socially constructed male and female roles towards gender representations in video games. In her lecture she will transfer human gender codes to the field of virtual characters and their body designs. In an exemplary way she will analyze the appearance of genders in most recent games.

Biography
– until 2015 professor for Gender Design and Design Research at the Koeln International School of Design, Technical University Cologne
– co-founder and co-owner of „be design“
– author and editor of numerous publications; the most recent one being “Gender Design – Streifzüge zwischen Theorie und Empirie” (Gender Design – Rambles between Theory and Research)
– frequent lecturer at universities in Germany, Japan, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, Korea, Australia and the USA
– co-founder of the German Association for Design Theory and Design History
– co-founder and chair of the „international Gender Design Network“

Earlier job roles included: Research Assistant at the University of Hanover; Deputy Director of a Hanover-based institute for women’s studies; vice-secretary of state of a ministerial department for Gender & Equality in Wiesbaden; development of the Swiss Design Center in Langenthal, Director of the ‚Forum‘ of the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, Bonn.

Die Veranstaltungsreihe wird durch die Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien und die Bundesstelle für die Positivprädikarisierung von Computer- und Konsolenspielen (BUPP) gefördert.

Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Wirtschaftsagentur Wien
Mit freundlicher Unterstützung vom Zentrum für Angewandte Spieleforschung der Donau Universität Krems