Adrienne Shaw is a game studies scholar and Associate Professor at Temple University. She is known for her work on queer theory and LGBTQ representation in video games. She is the author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture, the co-editor of Queer Game Studies, and the founder of the LGBTQ Video Games Archive.
Shaw's academic work focuses on gamer identity, the representation of marginalized populations in video games, and how members of marginalized communities understand their relationship to video games. Her work also extends to queerness and technology more broadly. Her first book, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture received the 2016 Outstanding Book Award from the Popular Communication Division of the International Communication Association, Warp Zone's 2015 Video Game Librarian Award, and it was listed on the American Library Association's 2016 Rainbow List. Media scholar Adrienne Massanari describes the book as an intervention "against much of the rhetoric of gaming culture that suggests that diversity is good but does little to interrogate why or for whom or in what ways diversity is desirable." Shaw co-edited, with Bonnie Ruberg, Queer Game Studies, an anthology of essays by academics, journalists, and game designers about queer representation and queer theory in video games. The collection was reviewed favorably by the LA Review of Books and Lambda Literary. Shaw also co-edited, with Katherine Sender, Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence and, with D. Travers Scott, Interventions: Communication Research and Practice.
Other work
Shaw is the founder of the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, a publicly available online archive that catalogues LGBTQ representation in video games. As part of her work with the LGBTQ Video Game Archive, Shaw worked with the Internet Archive to resurrect the oldest known example of an LGBTQ video game, C.M. Ralph's Caper in the Castro. In 2018, Shaw was one of the curators of the Rainbow Arcade exhibit at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, the first exhibit to cover the history of LGBTQ people in video games. USA Today included Rainbow Arcade on its list of best exhibits in Europe for winter 2019.
Shaw, A.. Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Chess, S. and Adrienne Shaw.. A conspiracy of fishes, or, how we learned to stop worrying about #GamerGate and embrace hegemonic masculinity. Journal of Broadcasting and New Media, 59, 208-220. DOI: 10.1080/08838151.2014.999917
Shaw, A.. Do you identify as a gamer? Gender, race, sexuality, and gamer identity. New Media & Society, 14, 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811410394
Shaw, A.. What Is Video Game Culture? Cultural Studies and Game Studies. Games and Culture, 5, 403–424. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009360414
Shaw, A.. Putting the Gay in Games: Cultural Production and GLBT Content in Video Games. Games and Culture, 4, 228–253. https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412009339729
