Freak Bitch – An Interactive Manifesto
Freak Bitch – An Interactive Manifesto is a collection of mini games based on a manifesto about “unfemininity”, the opposite of femininity but not masculinity or a lack of femininity. It’s structured according to four principles of being a Freak Bitch (someone unfeminine) that the player gets to act out in a corresponding game.
Femininity is a topic I have complicated feelings about. I have never been aligned with womanhood, but I am also not masculine. I am not particularly nurturing or timid or romantic or willing to sacrifice myself but I am not providing or dominant or conquering or any of those stereotypical buzzwords that one would associate with gender expression. I love fashion and the color pink, I hate being presentable. For the longest time, I didn’t know what these feelings meant for my gender expression. Was I missing a piece of the gender puzzle that everyone around me seemed to naturally fit into?
Then I thought that perhaps I am not failing or missing something, perhaps I am somewhere on a spectrum that I need to define myself. That’s how I came up with “unfemininity”. Unfemininity is to be the opposite of feminine but not inherently masculine and it still exists somewhere on the spectrum of femininity, perhaps it’s not linear, perhaps the spectrum is a circle or perhaps it has hidden layers. I wrote a manifesto about unfemininity where I outlined some principles of the practice. Then I turned the manifesto into a game.
The game consists of four mini-games and the option to read the full manifesto. Each game corresponds to a principle and also references a trope or gameplay style commonly found in browser-based “girl games” that were prevalent on the internet in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s. Girl games were, as the name suggests, games aimed at young girls that were notorious for perpetuating very stereotypical ideas of femininity. They were often about dressing up and shopping, cooking, being heterosexual, caring for children and animals, and decorating a home. Me and many women my age used to access these games on websites that hosted a large number of shorter girl games with simple gameplay that usually only consisted of completing a single objective. I thought that referencing these games for an interactive manifesto would be perfect. Girl games were one of the first ways one was introduced to femininity. What if you could re-visit them as an adult, but in an “un-” way?
A dress-up game about dressing weird, a cooking game about cooking and eating horrible food, a personality quiz about standing up to misogyny, a cleaning and decorating game about cleaning up inside your brain. In order to enforce that Freak Bitch is an interactive manifesto and not a traditional game, there is no way to lose the games and everything you do is met with unapologetic encouragement. The point of Freak Bitch is to allow the player to indulge in unfeminine weirdness. It’s meant to validate players who identify with unfemininity, but also to give players who have not explored that side of them a chance to give it a try. I figured making my target audience very small (unfeminine individuals who are comfortable with that identity and are interested in browser-based girl games) would allow people outside of it to peek inside out of curiosity. Having a target audience that’s too broad runs the risk of making the project so “general” that no one feels spoken to.
In all the written text and the visuals, I am very bold and nasty and use language and imagery that have typically negative connotations. “Freak” and “Bitch” are words one might call a loud and rude woman. The cooking game has you eat a soup made of fat and a joint. The quiz game features girls bleeding through their shorts and pooping on the floor. This is an act of reclaiming words and behaviors that are typically undesirable in women and turning them into something to flaunt, to be proud of. As feminist author Sara Ahmed outlines in her book ”The Feminist Killjoy Handbook” (2023), reclaiming has long played an important role in activism as a way to connect with people who are affected by negative stereotyping.
”When you reclaim the term feminist killjoy you end up in conversation with other people who, like you, find a potential in that term, in how its negativity can be redirected.” – Sara Ahmed, ”The Feminist Killjoy Handbook”, 2023
Freak Bitch can be played online in browser (another reference to the girl game era, of course) on the website itch.io which is linked in the About Me section. I hope that whoever has taken the time to read this far now feels excited to experience this little world of unfemininity and liberation and reclaiming that I spent so much time creating. Have fun playing!
References:
Ahmed, Sara. The Feminist Killjoy Handbook: The Radical Potential of Getting in the Way. Seal Press, 2023.
