Desires at Play

First Impressions

I met her in a bar. She was standing alone in a narrow, sparsely lit hallway, leaning nonchalantly against the wall, her pale skin in stark contrast with her all-black tight clothing. It was one of those moments when words are irrelevant, and I could not help but approach her. We spent the night together. She woke up in my temporary home, her dark hair entangled, and gazed at my limited bookcase. “Is that World of Warcraft I see over there?” she wondered, barely awake. “Ehum, yes,” I said, “but I only just bought it, it’s for a research project on queer women and online gaming.” “Aha,” she said, wide awake. “Well, I’m a Blizzard slave, I must confess. I’ve been playing for two years now.” We joked about me interviewing her, and how that hardly could be an ethical procedure. “Well, as long as I’m not in the nude, it should be ok,” she concluded. We left it at that. But only a few days later, I got an intriguing text message: “Do you want to meet up in Durotar somewhere this evening?”

I had literally just taken my first steps with my female green-haired rogue troll and I felt a bit reluctant to meet with her endlessly more powerful level 60+ female orc Slap. ⁴ But my curiosity led me to accept her offer. We did meet, in World of Warcraft, and we kept meeting up and playing together. She did not live in Stockholm, or even in Sweden, so scheduling “dates” (or more spontaneously happening to be on at the same time) in the game became a way of spending time and experiencing the game together. The research on gender and games is heavily populated by boyfriends, brothers, and other men as the ones who introduce women to gaming, and who also moderate and monitor their behavior (see, e.g., Bryce & Rutter, 2007; Lin, 2005; Schott & Horrell, 2000; Yee, 2008). In these discussions, gameplay is almost automatically coded as a masculine domain, and online games as somehow inherently sexist. Mine was an irresistibly different story.

Bricka surely had other playmates, both temporary liaisons and more stable relations. With time, she also got the company of other alts (i.e., of other characters belonging to myself). But in this early phase of gameplay, say between Level 5 and 25, the initial contact with this particular woman and her avatar was by far my most important and intense connection. She gave me a jump-start into the game. Slap protected Bricka with her playing body, introduced her to all sorts of in-game peculiarities, showed her places, and generally showed her a good time. Bricka had things to offer in return. Her good humor and wit, which made orc laughter blend with troll laughter as they ran together over the hills. Of relevance for a research project on emotion, sexuality, and games, I experienced firsthand the sensation of desiring someone through the game interface. An already enticing, immersive game experience was all the more charged through the ways in which desire and physical attraction came to circulate through the game. I would see “her,” the muscular orc woman, with her white tiger, come running toward me (or Bricka) across the dunes, the sand spurting from under foot and paw. Bricka’s heart would skip a beat. Or was it mine? Does it matter?

Kate Altork (1995, p. 110) reflects on the significance of first impressions and of multisensorial ways of knowing new places: “It has been my experience that any new locale sends all of my sensory modes into overdrive in the initial days and weeks of my stay.” In a similar manner, it is probably during the early phase of gameplay that moving through the landscape is the most enthralling, the music at its most magical, and overall the experience the most powerful. The slightly melancholic soft wind instruments of the Barrens, blending with the sound of a warm wind sweeping through dry grass, became the soundtrack of a brief love story. Bricka’s rogue leather attire, including a beautiful leather harness along with her swift blades, resonated in a life and in meetings beyond Azeroth. Pace, Bardzell, and Bardzell (2010) speak of the permeability of intimacy between real and virtual worlds, and it is very hard to tell what it was, more precisely, that constituted the limits of, or the source of these emotions. Or rather, it is quite clear that it was her, but rather unclear in which form. Was it her, regardless of the game? Was it her through the game? Was it her through the orc woman and the ways in which she moved and talked and somehow managed to reach out to me and touch something within me through the screen? Most likely, it was all of these things combined, which makes emotional boundaries coincide with the limits of a field that is not easily defined.

At first glance, questions of sexuality may seem irrelevant to a study of online game cultures. But my own experiences do not seem different from the experiences of many other World of Warcraft players. Game studies literature gives evidence of how many players play with people they already know (i.e., friends, family, partners, lovers, etc.; Nardi & Harris, 2006; Peterson, 2007; Yee, 2003, 2008), hence bringing various kinds of intimacy and closeness into game spaces. In World of Warcraft, sexuality performs on multiple levels: as a design feature, as part of players’ social practices (flirtations), as a source of imagination (the physical bodies of co-players), as a property of verbal abuse (“you’re so gay”), as a principle for discrimination (Krotoski, 2006), and so on. As a design element, sexuality is simultaneously both on and off. The interface prohibits physical contact between avatars; they cannot even hug each other after a successful battle. There may be textual hugs in the form of emotes, but these gestures do not translate onto the bodies of characters. At the same time, the bodies of avatars are heterosexualized in ways that, instead of eliminating sexuality from the game, bring the sexual into clear focus (Corneliussen, 2008). Avatars can strip down to their underwear, and the dance preprogrammed in, for example, female night elves imitates the moves of a pole-dance stripper.

Then again, there are certain bodies, movements, and moments of play that could be termed queer. Even if game culture rarely encourages non-normative and anti-normative ways of doing gender and sexuality, it is quite possible for, in my case, women to come together and play at least partly on their own terms. Those that I have met belong to guilds carrying names such as “bad girls.” They introduce each other. They create groups to conquer the game world. They fight together and protect each other. They start guilds featuring the impersonation of male characters, such as the cross-dressing “Drag Kings of Azeroth.” They play around with the in-game censorship of “bad” words, such as the impossibility of naming certain female parts. They meet up, they flirt, and on occasion have hot play dates across candle lit kitchen tables. World of Warcraft becomes in such moments a space for sexual attraction and desire—in-game as well as out-of-the-game—in ways not predicted by the game design.

Passionate Scholarship

This is not a confession for the sake of confessing. However, it may share certain affinities with what is commonly referred to as a “confessional mode” in ethnography (Van Maanen, 1988). If the traditional, realist mode of writing ethnographically consists of relatively impersonal, cool, detached language, writing in a confessional mode is, on the contrary, personal and engaged. Although traditionally, confessionals have rarely been part of “official” ethnography, this is an argument for placing the personal and the passionate at heart of ethnographic work. The text at hand is not self-therapeutic, but certainly autoethnographic, at least to some extent. It contains a discussion that makes use of personal experiences and emotions as potentially valuable sources of knowledge. Informants may tell you about online attractions, or of falling for someone in online venues. My story is not qualitatively different, but it does require a fairly intimate disclosure of the researching “I.” Autoethnography comes in many shapes and guises in the field of ethnographic research and writing. Here, it is primarily understood as a reflexive account of the culturally situated experiences of the researcher, and as such a way of knowing cultures. It borrows from autobiographical writing in that it invests in self-portraiture by literary means, turning the researcher into a subject of research. At the same time, autoethnography is an intrinsic part of ethnographic methods through its connecting the personal with the cultural, the social, and the political (cf. Ellis, 2004).

Mary Louise Pratt (1992, p. 7) ascribes the genre of autoethnography to marginalized subjects: “If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, auto-ethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations.” Deborah Reed-Danahay (1997), in turn, looks at the dual nature of autoethnography as a genre that merges postmodern ethnography (a critique of objectivism and realism) with postmodern autobiography (a critique of a coherent, autonomous self). Autoethnographic writing in this particular article is writing from the cultural margins as it brings to the fore culturally marginalized sexualities and desires. It offers a critique of mainstream ethnographic writing in articulating matters that for the most part have remained unexpressed, acknowledging that ethnographers, too, are desiring subjects. Simultaneously, it is an investigation of unclear boundaries of bodies and subjectivities in and through their multiple couplings with game technologies. As such, this text embodies something of a paradox in that it deconstructs the researcher as subject by troubling the border between knowing subjects and objects of knowledge, while at the same time writing out of the position of the “I,” however fractured, incomplete, and partial this position may be.

Writing within anthropology has traditionally been seen merely as an instrument, as a tool for taking notes in the field and for completing the final report. Language in this perspective is transparent mediation of lived experiences and social relations. The same kind of transcendence characterizes the ethnographer—the “neutral” observer—who comes to represent a disinterested truth. Alongside objectivist claims in traditional ethnographic writing, the telling of subjective experiences has certainly existed. Then again, these personal narratives rarely stand alone, but are usually preceded or followed by a “formal” ethnography that legitimizes them scientifically. This creates a paradoxical tension within the tradition itself, between subjective and “scientific” voices, through which fieldwork

produces a kind of authority that is anchored to a large extent in subjective, sensuous experience [. . . ]. But the professional text to result from such an encounter is supposed to conform to the norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject. (Pratt, 1986, p. 32)

Erotic subjectivity, experience, or desire in the field is (still) a rare topic in ethnographic writing. Similar to accounts of the more generally personal, written records of (the researcher’s) erotic subjectivity have, typically, figured separately from legitimate ethnographies, most notably the posthumous publishing of Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1967) private diary, Paul Rabinow’s (1977) one-night stand with a Moroccan woman, “thoughtfully provided by a male informant” (Newton 1993, p. 7), and Manda Cesara (1982), who wrote under a pseudonym of her intimate relation with a male informant. In recent years, there has been a somewhat wider range of publications that in various ways interrogate and break the silences surrounding ethnographers as sexual subjects (see, e.g., Kulick & Willson, 1995; Lewin & Leep, 1996; Markowitz & Ashkenazi, 1999; Wekker, 2006). In his introduction to the rare collection of essays Taboo: Sex, Identity and Erotic Subjectivity in Anthropological Fieldwork, Don Kulick (1995, p. 18) argues that “desire in the field seems to be one especially poignant means through which anthropologists become aware of themselves as positioned, partial, knowing selves.” He suggests that erotic subjectivity in the field is a potentially useful source of insight because it does things. Desire provokes questions at the core of anthropological production of knowledge. Desire draws attention to ways of knowing oneself and others, and it highlights the politics of bodily difference.

And yet, the silences around what Newton calls a “non-subject” in anthropology seem far from resolved. As Kulick points out, there seems to be something more and other at work than objectivist ideals, the disciplinary disapproval of the personal, and a more general cultural taboo against discussing (one’s own) sexuality that constitute such silences. Referencing Newton’s article, Kulick observes that not talking about the erotic subjectivity of fieldworkers operates on multiple levels: it makes invisible the norm(ality) of heterosexual male subjectivity (by cutting it off from the area of possible inquiry), and it works to silence women and gays for whom issues of gender and sexuality have never been easy. Besides performing within a register of sexism and homophobia, Kulick adds that “silence about the erotic subjectivity of fieldworkers also works to keep concealed the deeply racist and colonialist conditions that make possible our continuing unidirectional discourse about the sexuality of the people we study” (p. 4).

There is certainly a difference between doing the kind of fieldwork where staying in the field involves remaining in secluded places for long periods at a time and the kind of fieldwork performed online from the comfort of your office, kitchen table, or favorite coffee shop. New media ethnography rarely puts the researcher in isolated and lonely situations (even if spending long hours at the computer sometimes feels that way), but it nonetheless involves closeness to the medium, and possibly to others through this medium and beyond. As with all fieldwork, it is about interacting with others, and about forming interpersonal relationships over time. Working with and through notions of desire in the field can be a powerful way of exploring the conditions of knowledge production in ethnographic work, of the very boundaries that constitute legitimate modes of knowing. Then again, there is an interesting discussion of the possible limits of self-reflexivity in an erotic vein. Kulick (1995, p. 5) makes clear that the chapters of Taboo aim at addressing issues of theoretical and methodological significance, not at providing “a catalogue of ethnopornography.” Critics of the reflexive turn point to the fine line between the personal and the self-indulgent, and to the risk of using experiential modes of working and writing as means of merely reflecting on oneself (see Probyn, 1993).

Writing in an autoethnographic vein is a similarly tricky balancing act, and one that has caused considerable controversy among ethnographers. For example, Paul Atkinson (2006, p. 400) argues (along the lines of Anderson, 2006) for the importance of “analytic” ethnography, “too often lost to sight in contemporary fashions for subjective and evocative ethnographic work,” at the same time as he places the type of reflexivity suggestive of autoethnography in the mid of ethnographic traditions. It is interesting how something that is at risk of stealing the show, of moving the focus away from ethnography as analytic tradition, is positioned at the same time as an intrinsic part of that very tradition. And yet, something important is at stake in the critique of autoethnography. For where, more precisely, is the boundary between the personal and the passionate as culturally and politically significant, and the more narrowly self-referential and self-indulgent? Michelle Kisliuk (1997, p. 39) suggests that in order to productively to make use of our experiences in the field, we need to “ask ourselves whether an experience changed us in a way that significantly affected how we viewed, reacted to, or interpreted the ethnographic material.”

For me, it was never a matter of uncovering the personal for the sake of disclosure in and of itself, of performing a textual striptease for the thrill of the act. Had this been the case, the text at hand would have been far more steamy. In fact, I have been hesitant—and I still hesitate. “Epistemological uncertainty” forms part of the title of this article, and there are many things of which I am uncertain. Uncertainty, here, is meant to evoke a manner of not being sure of whether one’s methodological strategies will work productively in an academic setting. Uncertainty points at how ways of knowing are shaky, partial, and always in the process of being proved otherwise. Uncertainty may also work as a theoretical code word in new media ethnographies in relation to which the limits, of this body and that, and of the field itself, are everything but clear. Uncertainty as concept is central also to game studies in its way of troubling the magic circle and pointing at the embeddedness of games in everyday life. Uncertainty signals what Donna Haraway (1997, p. 190) calls a method of “being at risk,” an ethnographic attitude in which something is at stake in the face of the practices and discourses into which the researcher inquires. It has become clear to me that the manner in which I began to learn about gaming and queerness carries far too much weight for my research project to be concealed. And if my story is a shameful one to tell within a research context, what would that tell us about this very context? What would it tell us about particular understandings of “science” and the production of knowledge? As Probyn (2005, p. 75-106) has it, to feel shame speaks as much about the “shamers” as it does of the person in shame.

Critically Close

Closeness is key in much ethnographic fieldwork. And yet, there is a long-standing discussion of what happens if you come too close, of “going native” and no longer able to uphold the amount of distance required in the name of science. Even if self-reflexivity has been part of ethnographic work for decades, ideas and ideals of objectivity seem somehow to slip in through the back door. How close is too close—and why? What if a love affair—instead of blinding me—made me see particularly clearly? And what difference would it make if I dared to be open about this shift in me? Does desire per se make you less critical? It is commonly understood that when “in love” we experience, see, feel, taste, and smell things in a different way, and usually more acutely. Rather than dismissing such heightening of the senses as flawed in the sense that I may have “lost my head” (an expression that points at the conventional opposition between to think and to feel), I would be more interested in investigating such intensity as something that could be an important part of criticality.

There are obvious questions of power and ethics at play in fieldwork. Commonly, the researcher is understood as not only having the right of interpretation but also of inhabiting a more powerful position than the people being studied. Ethics in this context is about not misusing this power. The question of power in the field needs to be contextualized through the complex intersections of, for example, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and in my case, technology and game culture. As Newton (1993, p. 8) argues, “changing the gender and/or sexual orientation and probably the race of either fieldworker or informant modifies the terms of the erotic equation.” Is the researcher perhaps a heterosexual, white, Western with a PhD and the informant/bed partner a prostitute from Morocco? Or, are the people involved two middle-class queer women from Scandinavia? In a reading sensible to colonial as well as patriarchal power, the “erotic equation” figures differently in each situation.

In my case, there is also a need to contextualize power in terms of technological proficiency and knowledge of a particular game culture. Relations of power in the field have been anything but clear, and not always does the researcher have the upper hand. Initially, I was the one in need of introduction and protection. I have thought about the powerful draw in being guided and protected by a skilled player with a character on a much higher level. World of Warcraft has a lot to do with levels (at least during that part of the game when players are involved in the activity of “leveling up”) as well as with differences in knowledge of the game. When you let the cursor scan the landscape for friends and enemies, information about their levels are immediately available. This information tells you about your chances to defeat an enemy, or whether playing together with someone is mutually beneficial (if you are roughly on the same level, you will be able to take on the same quests, and in that sense grow stronger together). When a high-level character plays alongside and helps a low-level character, the game benefits for the high level are minimal. These are rather altruistic acts for the sheer pleasure of playing together. In my case, Bricka was the little one, and her admiration blended with my own for her protector and wild big sister.

Then again, to choose an unusually open way of writing about parts of the research process can be understood as an exercise of power. Therefore, it has been imperative to let the people involved in my study read and give me permission to move forward with my texts. For the present article, it was very important that I got permission and support from the woman I have met in multiple ways. On several occasions when playing, I have hinted at my ways of writing about the game and about her, but it was not until I sent her a shorter draft of this text that she saw any of this in writing. I held my breath for a week, maybe more, without a word from her, which made me increasingly nervous. Had I violated our trust? Had I somehow betrayed her? If ethics, as Probyn (2005, p. 34) claims, is awareness of what one’s actions might set in motion, was I no longer aware of what I might have stirred up? This surely was intense material in more ways than one, and I felt relief once I received the following e-mail response from her: “Hi Jenny and Bricka! I smile. Slap grins. We flex our muscles. [. . . ] This is hot, hot, hot.” Not only did she give this part of my research project her blessing, she was also flattered. She even thought that bringing intimate issues out in the open was a vital part of the project, and one that could make a significant difference.

Probyn (2005, p. 129-141) notes the importance of including the researching body in academic writing, of being attentive to how the body feels and reacts in the process as an important indicator of how you as a researcher relate to and understand that which you research. World of Warcraft has from the very beginning been a charged, social interface with obvious resonance in the body. The intensity of game play has involved everything from physical attraction to battle adrenaline and social complications. And as with most love stories, this one, too, has an ending. Or rather, our contact was over time transformed from having had a tangible erotic charge to instead be recharged and redefined. And at some point, in the mid of this process, I experienced a short, intense period of grief, which came to circulate in the most intricate ways throughout the game. If previously, I had held my breath when she logged on and felt my heart beat faster, I now experienced ambivalence. I simultaneously longed for and was unwilling to meet up. Her attitude toward me was different and more distanced, as was mine to her, I am sure. It is always a matter of survival. Not as much small talk. No superfluous gestures. Instances of co-play were few and far between.

I experienced this period of game play as quite lonely, no matter how many others were logged on at the same time. It is (perhaps not surprisingly) striking how lonely one might feel while playing solo in game interfaces that build on the social and on playing together with others. Bricka took on solo quests, but seemed to lack the necessary spark to stay alive and carry through. Moments of melancholia left marks in my field notes. Then again, even during this period of relative loneliness, playing was still more often than not a question of playing with others. Co-play is often promiscuous and instrumental; it is about joining forces to carry out a certain mission. I aligned Bricka with temporary groups, but no one in these fleeting play situations made a lasting impression, no one was as charismatic as Slap used to be.

Over time, my sense of play changed anew. Bricka grew stronger and became attractive for more complex missions. She formed a particular liaison with a female undead, who leveled up quickly to play with her as an equal. It still happens that I play alongside my initial contact, the orc woman, who is as vibrant as ever, but we now come together as friends with a particular history. And yet, sometimes when I ride my first rather slow Emerald Raptor mount (that I have kept for purely nostalgic reasons) from the auction house in Orgrimmar, to the zeppelin tower in northern Durotar, which connects the old world with that of the more recent continents of Outland and Northrend, I can still feel the remains of an in-game as well as out-of-the-game love affair. What reminds me the most powerfully is the musicality and the feel of Durotar’s burnt soil which provided a backdrop to first encounters, first impressions, and first experiences.

Kendall (2008) asks the question of how an inclusion of the erotic potentials of fieldwork would change her analysis of embodiment and gender in a virtual world. In her case, it became clear that physical attractions belonged to the physical world. Even if occasional online flirts could make long sittings at the keyboard more interesting and tolerable, attractions were something that “began after meeting people in person. In short, they were physical attractions” (p. 106). Moreover, she argues that an inclusion of these feelings, of more information regarding her relationships with informants, “might well have made for a better ethnography” (p. 103). In my World of Warcraft ethnography, I believe including my particular introduction to the game in writing makes an important difference. Following Kisliuk, I ask myself whether this experience changed me in a way that significantly affected how I understood the field. It did. Not to address the ways in which I came to the game and was taken (in) by an alluring game world and an alluring woman alike, would be playing it safe, but would also downplay a potentially important source of knowledge. In playing and studying games, motion and emotion, and then hiding my own experiences—which in significant ways have shaped my theoretical and methodological concerns—seems to me a mistake. My initial connection opened up to me a place and a culture that, in her words, could be “a sexy, organic, moving animation with a pulse.” It provided me with an understanding up-close of how emotions may come to flow through the game, and of the potential queerness of it all. Given the relative lack of discussions of queer theory and queer lives within game studies, it seems valuable to contribute with a slightly different story. ⁵ There are other stories to be told, and telling mine might well be a risk worth taking.

Machinic Desires

The question is where an ethnographic project of writing about queer desire in the field—and of writing with passion—takes us. What does it tell us about an online game world, such as World of Warcraft? And what does it reveal about ethnographic methods and ethnographic writing? I believe that writing about desire in the field does at least two things. First, it helps challenge the modes and codes of heteronormativity that efficiently, yet for the most part silently, underpin game studies and ethnographic fieldwork alike. Second, to make visible the ways in which desire and emotion may circulate through game spaces demands an articulation of desire as intimately related to technology, of desiring technology and of technological, or perhaps technologized desires.

Kulick argues that questions of desire in the field are potentially useful sources of knowledge because desire does things, it puts things in motion (which previously were perhaps unmoving). Writing queer desire provides a critique of norms and normality in fieldwork. To bring to light that which is not fully of the norm, but which nonetheless is essential for the norm to work, is not merely writing from sexual margins. Far from being of relevance only to the like-minded (or like-bodied), queer sexuality and queer theory speak volumes about the configuration of heteronormal emotions, bodies, games, and ethnographies. World of Warcraft is a place far from free of sexism and homophobia. The word “gay” is used regularly as verbal abuse, as a way of reinforcing hegemonic heteronormativity (Pascoe, 2007), and for example, male blood elves with their relatively androgynous appearance and long hair are often classified as particularly “gay.” Interestingly, male blood elves were initially slimmer, but Blizzard settled eventually for more muscles in an attempt to make the characters more “masculine.” ⁶

Then again, even if the original design was changed and moved in a more “safe” direction (along the lines of a heteronormal logic according to which body mass equals masculinity equals strength), the result is still routinely read as an instance of male femininity—and as such cherished among queer gamers. On the reverse side of the gender spectrum, beyond massive legions of slender yet voluptuous, long-haired women (humans, night elves, and blood elves), there are options for female masculinity (the female orc), as well as perhaps a tomboy position incarnated by the androgynous, slouching, otherworldly female undead. Female trolls are different altogether in their ways of performing a rough-around-the-edges femininity with certain rebellious undertones (their husky laughter, their grounded way of dancing from the hip, their bragging way of flirting manifested in lines such as “When enraged and in heat, a female troll can mate over eighty times in one night, are you prepared?”). I cannot help finding Bricka exceedingly cute—and to be perfectly honest, quite hot—in a proud and straight-backed kind of fashion.

More than being of anecdotal interest, this sense of connection that I have with my characters (and that I have come to learn other players might have with their characters too), as well as with some others, is an intriguing part of game experiences. Part identification, part desire, Bricka was my first World of Warcraft incarnation, a loyal companion, a tough cookie, a hot chick, and an overall brave heroine. Had I not enjoyed her company, sessions with solo play in the most repetitive of fashions would not have been half as enjoyable. It seems reasonable to argue that the ways in which desire is played out within the game gather together at least three intimately interlinked components: the players, the avatars, and the game. The most passionate of affairs with the game come about when you are drawn in, not only by another avatar/player, but by your own avatar as well as by the game “itself.” Looking back, not only was I powerfully attracted to an orc woman (and her player), but probably as much attracted to and absorbed with my own troll girl and with her way of leveling up and moving through and exploring a wide range of captivating game spaces. The question is, then, how such overlaying of desire—between women, and between women and technologies—could be understood. Put differently, in which ways could lesbian desire be conceptualized with or through technologies?

In “Refiguring Lesbian Desire,” Elizabeth Grosz (1995) formulates a critique of the conventional conceptualization of desire along the lines of a Freudian ontology of lack. According to this logic, desire is fleshed out as a heterosexualized binary arrangement of men as active, desiring subjects, and of women as passive objects of desire, rendering impossible the autonomy of subjects, particularly the autonomy of women. Desire as lack is desiring that which is unobtainable, since it can only function if it remains unfulfilled. And if desire, following Freud, can only be masculine in nature, this makes the notion of female (or rather feminine) desire a contradiction of terms. The only way in which “she” can be positioned as a subject who desires is to abandon femininity, to instead desire “as a man” (p. 178). Grosz seeks to not only think women as desiring subjects but also to find ways of thinking desire between women. She proposes a reconfiguration of desire, “not in terms of what is missing or absent, nor in terms of depth, latency, interiority, but in terms of surfaces and intensities” (p. 179). She draws on Spinoza’s understanding of desire as a force of positive production, and on Deleuze and Guattari to envision desire as inventive, creative, as forms of contacts, intensities, and connections between bodily surfaces. She expounds, “the sites most intensely invested in desire occur at a conjunction, an interruption, a point of machinic connection [. . .] between one thing and another” (p. 182). For her, these “things” in machinic connections (and disconnections) with one another are fragments, parts of bodies that never combine to integrated wholeness. They are points of contact between surfaces, “between a hand a breast, a mouth and a cunt” (p. 183), forging intensities for their own sake, always production, never reproduction.

For Grosz, the term lesbian does not disappear and become queer. Then again, lesbian is not being, but becoming, it enters into an assemblage of other (machine) parts, into a sequence of flows and disruptions, of varying speed and intensities. Lesbian is not an identity, it is not a position, but a mode of moving and changing, of always being in the process of becoming otherwise, always unstable, fleeting, provisional: “the question is not am I—or are you—a lesbian, but rather, what kinds of lesbian connections, what kinds of lesbian-machine, we invest our time, energy, and bodies in, what kinds of sexuality we invest ourselves in, with what other kinds of bodies, and to what effects?” (p. 184). Her imaginary lesbian is a lesbian machine, a lesbian cyborg of sorts, which seems particularly apt to provide a conceptual framework—or a baseline—for queer, experiential, experimental techno-ethnographies. In parts and in interconnections, this lesbian machinery invests time and energy in her own body and in those of others, “eliminating the privilege of the human over the animal, the organic over the inorganic, the male over the female, the straight over the ‘bent’” (p. 185). If there is something machinic at heart of lesbian (and other) becomings, there may also be something exceedingly queer, or “bent,” about intimate circuits of women and machines. It appears to me as if the lesbian machine in Grosz’s writing connects in interesting ways with affective encounters between women and technologies more generally. If women as desiring subjects border on the unthinkable, then how could women desiring technologies be understood (given that technologies much like desire have been aligned with masculinity)?

It seems to me that there are important ways in which female game bodies, even in the mid of heteronormative game interfaces, appear to be sexing these spaces in ways that are intriguingly queer. Even if the number of female players of online games is constantly growing, the ideas and ideals of hegemonic straight femininity seem to collide frequently with how gaming as a technological practice is habitually coded as a masculine activity. Elsewhere, I have discussed and troubled the cultural paradox of female machines, of women’s close relationships with technologies, since such alignments break with the tradition of the technological masculine, of men and machines, boys and their toys (Sundén, 2007, 2008). Wendy Faulkner (2000) discusses this paradox in women’s passion for technologies, how for example female engineers need to downplay an interest in technologies to not be perceived as unfeminine, or, with Faulkner’s terminology, “gender inauthentic.” At the point where that which is not feminine needs to be its opposite—as with the Freudian logic of desire as lack—is precisely where Grosz’s lesbian machine could prove useful. Even if it does not go by the name “queer,” queer is what it does. An alternative understanding of the seemingly unholy alliance between women and intense, passionate, violent game play could be to look at it as an instance of queer femininity. It is queer in the sense that female players are engaged in non-normative, or even anti-normative ways of doing femininity through their culturally illegitimate couplings with straight masculinity, technology, and power (cf. Kennedy, 2006). It is neither a question of femininity as failure, nor as absence, but certainly of femininity gone wrong, and coming back with a vengeance.

By way of ending, and also as a way of pointing to questions for further discussion, I want to argue that writing with passion (as in writing passionately, and not only writing about passion, emotion, attraction) addresses the place of not only desire, but of sense-making through sensation more broadly in ethnographic work. The many connections between “to sense” and “to make sense” have long troubled ethnographic epistemologies. To take into account the full potential of knowing through the body and, in Maya Unnithan-Kumar’s (2006) words, “sensing the field,” would demand a different set of ethnographic epistemologies. To recognize the critical potential of sensation demands a different understanding of the critical and the sensuous, as not in opposition, but rather deeply entangled with one another. For me, a step in this direction has been to recognize the significance of “to fall” for someone, or something—a woman, an avatar, a game—and to trace this very falling as a way of thinking through the relations between desire, new media, and ethnography.