Abstract
The relationship between contemporary cultural debates related to gender and depictions of outer space travel in digital games has remained overlooked in game and media studies, despite the gendered spacefarer human’s embodied and disembodied representations playing a crucial role in a broad variety of science fiction games. This chapter offers such analysis, exploring the novel forms of gender representations in contemporary digital games with outer space themes, with theories of critical post-humanism as its guiding analysis framework. Within the science fiction thematic context of outer space, this study analyses the role of disembodiment and gendered representations of space travellers as narrative devices and core elements of game-play mechanics.
By employing an analysis based on the thematology and mythanalysis approaches in game studies, the chapter investigates embodied and disembodied representations of gender, in the wide-ranging theme of outer space in contemporary digital games. Using theories of critical posthumanism and the recent related debates as a lens to look at the disembodiment of the spacefarer human’s representations, the study elaborates on the cultural construction of outer space in science fiction as an imaginary landscape across a variety of popular works of contemporary digital games of the last decade.
Gender across Media Landscapes
O’Toole, O., Kowal, E., & Kaminska, A. (Eds.). (26 Feb. 2026). Gender across Media Landscapes. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
The end of the first quarter of the 21st century invites us to revisit what gender means in society and how it has shaped our literal and cultural landscapes. This volume seeks to explore these spaces from interdisciplinary perspectives.
The contributions span both “highbrow” art and popular culture, mapping interactions between gender and landscape as represented through numerous media. From urban to wild landscapes, distant planets, but also discursive practices, gendered domesticity, and the landscape of the body, the reader is invited to reflect on gender as a ubiquitous cultural marker.
While contributing to the growing body of work on gender, media, and landscape, the volume lays out a new groundwork for developments in interdisciplinary studies on gender and its possible futures.
ISBN: 978-90-04-75459-1 (ebook), 978-90-04-75189-7 (hardback). Publication: 26 Feb 2026