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A Night for Flesh and Roses: An Exploration in Flesh Remixing and the Sublime Transgender Grotesque

Creative Commons 'BY-NC' version 4.0 license
Abstract

The transgender body is a liminal space that refuses to exist in neat categories. As such, it is often considered a monstrous body. By examining how transgender people reclaim the monstrous and grotesque, I created a game that positions players as subjects of new, speculative bodies of desire. Utilizing analogue collage and stop motion animation techniques, A Night for Flesh and Roses is a narrative video game set in a transmedia installation investigating what a body can be in a post-human world. Players create characters out of 19th century anatomical illustrations while navigating relationships with monsters similar to themselves who refuse to align with what a “normal” body is expected to be. By creating new body configurations, we can envision a world that embraces a larger, flexible, more intersectional definition of humanity that embraces boundless possibilities and, therefore, see humanity in those for whom it has been denied.

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