Date of Award

Spring 2025

Language

English

Embargo Period

4-30-2025

Document Type

Master's Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

College/School/Department

Department of English

Program

English

First Advisor

Elliot Tetreault

Second Advisor

Ineke Murakami

Keywords

dungeons & dragons, game studies, medieval period, performativity, play, queer utopia

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | Medieval Studies | Queer Studies

Abstract

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has had countless participants and audience members in the course of its over fifty-year existence. It has also been the subject of several studies that attempt to capture its unique form of performative play. Yet, there has been a scarcity of scholarship on how D&D acts as a neomedievalism and how that can offer a queer kind of opportunity to its players, allowing them to find a place in a past that is historically inaccessible and yet endlessly in the process of being (re)imagined. Using an interweaving of archival theory with queer and performance studies, particularly in regard to José Esteban Muñoz’s conceptions of queer utopia and futurity, this thesis will seek to explore what is remembered, what is forgotten, and how play can help to rethink the boundaries between these two points. Here, the problematics of history-making entwine with the possibilities presented by ‘playing queer,’ a style of gameplay that allows individuals to rewrite the rules dictating the narrativity and performativity of the game and of their own lives. D&D, in its emphasis on both the individual experience of identity and the collaborative imagination at its core, gives its participants the chance to remake their expectations of their own world and of all the worlds that came before. Through the window it provides into the potential of the medieval, D&D shows us how a transtemporal queer and trans community across time is only a touch away—all it takes is a roll of the dice.

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