Research and Publications — Jean Ketterling

Sex and the Single-Player

My dissertation, “Play the Body Electric: Sex and Desire in Indue and Experimental Single-Player Sexual Videogames,” blends feminist, queer, and affect theories in the study of how videogames represent sex. Using textual analysis of indie and experimental videogames, I analyze the visual, haptic, and aural affordances of videogames to move players’ bodies in sexual ways, and shape the body’s sexual capacities.

My analysis of single-player sexual videogames challenges the notion that technologically mediated sex is a poor facsimile of ‘real’ intimacy and presents a theoretical framework for taking the affordances of sexual videogames seriously in their own right.

Image: ‘La Petite Mort’ (Lovable Hat Cult, 2016)

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Ketterling, Jean. "Look Behind You! Playing with Sexual Surveillance in You Must be 18 or Older to Enter and how do you Do It?." Surveillance & Society. 22, no. 1 (2024): 25-40.

Desjardins, Bridgette, and Jean Ketterling. 2023. "'Running Makes Me Feel …': The Production of Emotion through Leisure." Leisure Studies, 43, no. 3 (2024): 477-490.

Desjardins, Bridgette M., Jean Ketterling, and Taryn Hepburn. "‘It's Not Fair!’: Constructing Gendered Legal Subjects via Trans-Exclusionary Sport Legislation." International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics 14, no. 4 (2022): 673-687.

Ketterling, Jean. "'You Do it for the Good Times': Rival Feminist Readings of Torture and Kink in Grand Theft Auto V." Feminist Media Studies 23, no. 7 (2022): 3452-3467.

Book Chapters

Ketterling, Jean. "The Shadow of the Sex Wars: Self-regulation and Pornographic Video Games" In Handbook on Sex and Sexuality in Game Studies, edited by Matthew Wysocki and Steffi Shook. Bloomsbury. 2024 (forthcoming)

Ketterling, Jean. "Playing with Borders: Bringing Emotion into the Law Classroom Using Video Games." In Law, Video Games, Virtual Realities: Playing Law, edited by Dale Mitchell, Ashley Pearson, and Timothy Peters, pp. 133-153. Routledge. 2023.

Khan, Ummni, and Jean Ketterling. "Rape as Play: Yellow Peril Panic and a Defence of Fantasy." In The Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, pp. 357-395. Brill Nijhoff, 2019