Help a girl out! – A board game for women about performative femininity.

I think of performative femininity.

I talk to my friends who are also women, and sometimes we open up to each other.

Between winces, sullen looks and laughter; from the disregarded taboos of womanhood, we piece together a giant shame monster.

We admire it, it towers us in its enormity. Made up of body hair, constricted in some parts by too small bras, stockings and corsets- its fat spilling out in other places.

Piercing its flesh, we get glimpses of all the unnecessary, expensive, painful devices we’ve used on ourselves in the secrecy of our homes; epilators, diet pills, whitening creams, tanning lotions, glistening and shiny powders full of chemicals.

It’s hideous, it’s gorgeous.

In this project I explore the topic of gender expectations, more specifically performative femininity, through the making of a board game for women.

Gender expression is essentially one of the pillars of our identity, it is arguably inseparable to how we think, act, make choices for ourselves in daily life.

In an idyllic world, maybe we would stop caring about gender. Yet so many women, including myself, still wake up and perform for ourselves and others. Compare ourselves to other women, who is the better of us two? We repress our bodies and minds in ways that logically make no sense. But if we fail at this performance, we have failed at our gender, thus a huge part of what makes us, us.

A step towards fighting this seemingly unescapable system is at least to relate to one another and find community in our ills. Talk to each other, support each other. Find out that if we all feel like we’re failing at the performance, maybe it’s time we step off the stage in some way.

“Who am I beyond the performance, could you help me find it again?”.

Making a board game to talk about such complex topics as gender identity and representation is no coincidence. Indeed, many scholars have written about the powerful tool of gaming for imagining alternative narratives and speculate on what it could mean to exist outside of strict social boundaries.

One being Mary Flanagan in her book Critical Play: Radical Game Design. In her work, she goes into depth how game design can be thought of as a tool for social change, as it enables a space that is not fully emerged in fantasy nor reality. When you play you are in between- and this creativity allows for different actions and thoughts to emerge and reposition themselves.

Therefore, facilitated by the questions asked in the game and their emerging conversations, a group of girl friends can build their safe space and allow themselves to plan the blueprints of guilt-free womanhood.

In designing the game, one major point where I focused my attention was the making of the pieces I use as pawns. There, I was careful to consider the representation of people, and how that might impact the viewer. Thanks to feedback I got from different women, I came to a, although not perfect, but rather inclusive outcome.

The body is rather abstract with no defining curves because I did not want to pick a single “real” body shape that could look as the default, as there is no such thing. 

Where I did put an emphasis on realism was in the illustration of different shapes of breasts and pubic hair on all the bodies. I feel it is important to not misrepresent our adult bodies, and smooth them out like Barbies.

It was also crucial for me to depict the woman’s naked body in an attempt to normalize its representation outside of sexual contexts usually seen in the media.

References

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008.