Keywords: queer, homonationalism, BioWare, Mass Effect, biopower, populationsĬontent note: This article discusses death and space military violence. In fact, queerness serves, in many ways, as a useful economic resource as well, allowing the company to appeal to LGBTQ consumers via the lure of representation while only offering a vision of queer life that earns approval via military service and diligence. By tracing what queer bodies are allowed to count-and what ways-within the abstracted, mission-first logic and gameplay objectives of each title, a vision of Mass Effect (and the modern BioWare RPG more widely) emerges in which queerness is made, above all, to be a useful asset to the nation-state, and expendable when not. In tethering representations of willing, patriotic queer crew members willing to offer themselves up to the game’s overall edict and play structure to save the galaxy and the future at all costs, BioWare renders LGBTQ identity as ideally complicit with neocolonial objectives and counted as a “positive” resource in the fight.
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When (and What) Queerness Counts: Homonationalism and Militarism in the Mass Effect Series by Jordan Youngblood Abstractĭrawing upon the theoretical work done by Jasbir Puar and other scholars in linking normative queer identity to trends of militarism and national identity, this paper examines how two titles by the developer BioWare-2010’s Mass Effect ’s Mass Effect 3-integrate various depictions of LGBTQ-affiliated characters into a larger systemic ludic process of thinking about populations as resources, numbers, and ultimately quite literally “war assets” to be expended.