“Fashion. Fairy Tales. Femininity. These are the enduring provocations, the paradoxical and promising puzzles, that fascinated Angela Carter. The gendered inheritances of fashion, fairy tales, and femininity attracted Carter’s keen with and wry sensibilities, and their underlying structures—the internal logics and languages, the implicit rules and conventions, practically begging to be transgressed—certainly piqued her interest and inspired the play and irreverence so characteristic of her work. The three wend their way across Carter’s oeuvre, ever present and productively entangled in the reimagined fairy tales for which she is perhaps best known as well as in her novels and short fiction, her journalistic sketches, even her performances of self. Carter interlaced these abiding preoccupations, their themes and their forms, their narrative legacies and their cultural politics, until they came to define her voice, until they facilitated her self-fashioning as a writer and as a woman.” (297)

“Fashion may be a layered, complicated system whereas the fairy tale is a straightforward, simple one, but Carter was drawn to both because she saw in their underlying languages and laws, their structures and forms, the potential for challenging their collaborations with mythologies of hegemonic femininity.” (302)

“Focusing on loss as the heart of virtual-end machinima challenges the critical tendency to read them solely as extensions of the gaming experience and instead reveals their significance for a broader cultural politics of gender and desire. Within this context, I read the avatar suicide video “Me Quitting wow,” created by Hockey1912, as motivated by an almost overwhelming grief inspired, implicitly, by melancholy gender…

     While the “Me Quitting wow” video illustrates nicely some of the complexities of a self-avatar subjectivity, it also clearly articulates the ways in which the avatar is frequently figured as lover, including—most often—same-sex lover (since male avatar and player are often of the same sex). That is, although gender-crossing is not uncommon in World of Warcraft, according to Nick Yee’s extensive research among players, boys and men tend to play female avatars much more frequently than girls and women play male avatars; in fact, Yee found that “about 1 out of every 2 female characters is played by a man” while “about 1 out of every 100 male characters is played by a woman” (“WOW”). So, while player and avatar are not always the same sex, male avatars tend overwhelmingly to be played by boys and men. At the same time, the vast majority of virtual-end machinima feature male avatars, thus further underscoring the particular relevance of melancholy masculinity to their cultural resonance and meaning.” (57-58)

“Within the context of Butler’s theory of melancholy gender, the avatar as self and lover might also be understood as two different expressions of the foreclosed—and thus lost—love object in the context of compulsory heterosexuality. That is, the avatar enables both a recognition of what heterosexist culture renders unrecognizable and an enactment of its loss. By explicitly casting the avatar as both self and lover, virtual-end machinima create an important space of public grieving in which the cultural prohibitions against such recognition and mourning might be suspended. As a significant part of World of Warcraft’s broader cultural context, these videos, with their powerful mourning of a same-sex love object, disrupt norms of heteromasculinity, perhaps opening up possibilities for grieving the ungrievable love that haunts melancholy masculinity. (59-60)