Navigating Women's Cultural Representation Through Video Games in the Obama Era

Abstract

While the representations of women in video games have remained disappointingly negative since the 1980s, America’s political shift from the presidencies of George W. Bush to Barack Obama in 2007 had important cultural implications, particularly impacting the representation of women in popular culture. This thesis will examine the cultural depictions of women from 2002-2011, providing a particular focus on the unique cultural factors prevalent during this time period—including the expansion of pornography, a conservative cultural backlash to Obama, and the rapid deterioration of ‘political correctness’—that impacted how images of women in video games were received. Analyzing the cultural atmosphere of this time period will demonstrate whether or not Obama’s democratic presidency had an impact on the representation of women on American culture as a whole. An analysis of the first two installments of the video game series BioShock and Dead Space will demonstrate that women are first valued for their sexual availability while simultaneously being discursively excluded from any cultural agency. Once Obama takes office and makes several advances toward gender equality, BioShock 2 and Dead Space 2 join other reactionary products of popular culture at the time by depicting how women abuse their power to threaten men.