My scholarship is concerned with understanding how the always political relationship between language and power is manifested in and reproduced through the digital high technologies that have become synonymous with late capitalism in contemporary mass culture. Employing a variety of Marxist and post-structuralist approaches, I am not only interested in understanding the performances that are often valorized as good, worthwhile, or meaningful in the discourses surrounding high-technology literacy. I am also interested in the larger question of how these ostensibly “new” forms of performance are constructed in opposition to the past via larger popular traditions such as medievalism through which our culture has historically expressed desires and anxieties about race, gender, sexuality, and emerging technologies.

Video games are central to my research. Constructed as simultaneously embodying the promise and the perils of digital high technology, they are often evaluated on the basis of two seemingly contradictory standards. Expected to invoke or approximate the real, their graphics, sounds, and physics are measured in terms of the photorealism they afford players. At the same time, however, they are also evaluated on the fantasy they offer—the veracity with which they are able to conjure alternative and, at times, impossible realities. Contemporary video games thus embody one of the most liberating and, simultaneously, one of the most threatening tenets of poststructualist thought. In their fragmented, quantum approaches to play and reality, they raise the possibility that the real is not transcendent, external, or universal, but a political construction, one that is produced and policed through consensus, coercion, and language and which can therefore be interrogated, disputed, and perhaps even dismantled.