UCLA

In this dissertation, I focus on marginalized and intersecting identities—oft-perceived as monstrous by the dominant culture—and argue for alternative ways to understand identity formation through the lens of monstrosity by primarily analyzing the music and sound from four indie video games: Undertale (2015), Night in the Woods (2017), Celeste (2018), and Hades (2020). I turn to the monster as a site of possibility and a way of being for marginalized peoples, who, in response to being Othered, have created something more for themselves that humans and the human category cannot offer. I blend interpretive analysis and ethnography to propose alternative ways in which the player/listener can hear and listen to the queer, gendered, racialized, and/or disabled monster, all the while embracing the complexities of their monstrousness. I am in dialogue with queer theorist Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s theorization of reparative reading and argue that repair has its limitations. Instead, I inquire why the monster needs to be repaired and who actually benefits from repair. In this dissertation, I am not calling for an empathetic player/listener who will “humanize” the monster but, rather, I demonstrate how, when musically animated, monsters can refuse to follow the normative conventions by which the human category has been historically defined.Chapter 1 explores how identity has been discussed in both academic and non-academic spaces, as well as how music and sound can be tied to identity, particularly in video games. Chapter 2 investigates the relationship between horror and the monster. Chapter 3 turns from horror to failure framed through the lens of different temporalities. Last but not least, Chapter 4 considers how, in spite of their associations with horror and failure, monsters make worlds for themselves that let them be, which I argue is frequently done through a disidentificatory practice.