Sexy 16-Year-Old Baby-Eater: Gendered, Sexualized, and Racialized Discourses in Exalted, Second Edition

Abstract

Previous research finds roleplaying games, as well as the wider spectrum of geek culture that they exist within, to be defined by discourses favoring a white, heterosexual, cis-male viewpoint, drawing up and reproducing stereotypes and tropes that are inherently misogynist, homophobic, and racist. Heretofore, research into discourses of gender, sexuality, and race in roleplaying games has focused overwhelmingly on market leader Dungeons & Dragons (1971- ongoing), largely neglecting to scrutinize other well-established titles that may adhere to or break from the same tendencies. This thesis attempts to bridge part of that gap by looking at the fantasy roleplaying game Exalted (2001-ongoing), a game with a reputation for challenging conventions of the genre and the medium. Scrutinizing a dataset of 31 sourcebooks making up the majority of the material published for the second edition of the roleplaying game, the thesis uses a method of multimodal feminist post-structural discourse analysis to unpack dominant discourses within the roleplaying game text. Putting findings in context with theory, the thesis finds that the second edition of Exalted reproduces many of the same discourses found in roleplaying games and in wider geek culture: In text and images, women are constructed as normatively young and beautiful and as adhering to a pre-set, limiting and commodified set of roles matching Irigaray’s (1985) virgin, mother, and prostitute; women who fail to adhere to these roles are routinely Othered as are racial, sexual, and gender minorities. This is entirely in line with similar findings for other roleplaying games, suggesting that even active attempts to subvert genre tropes and discourses may result in reproducing said tropes and discourses. This extensive study of a major roleplaying game edition may provide a significant launching point for research into the continued evolution of roleplaying games and geek culture.