How do gender and sexuality come to matter in online game cultures? Why is it important to explore "straight" versus "queer" contexts of play? And what does it mean to play together with others over time, as co-players and researchers? Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures is a book about female players and their passionate encounters with the online game World of Warcraft and its player cultures. It takes seriously women's passions in games, and as such draws attention to questions of pleasure in and desire for technology. The authors use a unique approach of what they term a "twin ethnography" that develops two parallel stories. Sveningsson studies "straight" game culture, and makes explicit that which is of the norm by exploring the experiences of female gamers in a male-dominated gaming context. Sunden investigates "queer" game culture through the queer potentials of mainstream World of Warcraft culture, as well as through the case of a guild explicitly defined as LGBT. Academic research on game culture is flourishing, yet feminist accounts of gender and sexuality in games are still in the making. Drawing on feminist notions of performance, performativity and positionality, as well as the recent turn to affect and phenomenology within cultural theory, the authors develop queer, feminist studies of online player cultures in ways that are situated and embodied.

How do gender and sexuality come to matter in online game cultures? Why is it important to explore "straight" versus "queer" contexts of play? And what does it mean to play together with others over time, as co-players and researchers?

Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures is a book about female players and their passionate encounters with the online game World of Warcraft and its player cultures. It takes seriously women 's passions in games, and as such draws attention to questions of pleasure in and desire for technology.

The authors use a unique approach of what they term a "twin ethnography" that develops two parallel stories. Sveningsson studies "straight" game culture, and makes explicit that which is of the norm by exploring the experiences of female gamers in a male-dominated gaming context. Sund n investigates "queer" game culture through the queer potentials of mainstream World of Warcraft culture, as well as through the case of a guild explicitly defined as LGBT.

Academic research on game culture is flourishing, yet feminist accounts of gender and sexuality in games are still in the making. Drawing on feminist notions of performance, performativity and positionality, as well as the recent turn to affect and phenomenology within cultural theory, the authors develop queer, feminist studies of online player cultures in ways that are situated and embodied.

Exploring feminist social media tactics that use humor as a form of resistance to misogyny, the affective dynamics of shame, shaming, and shamelessness.Online sexism, hate, and harassment aim to silence women through shaming and fear. In Who's Laughing Now? Jenny Sunden and Susanna Paasonen examine a somewhat counterintuitive form of resistance: humor. Sunden and Paasonen argue that feminist social media tactics that use humor, laughter, and a sense of the absurd to answer name-calling, offensive language, and unsolicited dick pics can rewire the affective circuits of sexual shame and acts of shaming. Using laughter as both a theme and a methodological tool, Sunden and Paasonen explore examples of the subversive deployment of humor that range from @assholesonline to the Tumblr "Congrats, you have an all-male panel!" They consider the distribution and redistribution of shame, discuss Hannah Gadsby's Nanette, and describe tactical retweeting and commenting (as practiced by Stormy Daniels, among others). They explore the appropriation of terms meant to hurt and insult--for example, self-proclaimed Finnish "tolerance whores"--and what effect this rerouting of labels may have. They are interested not in lulz (amusement at another's expense)--not in what laughter pins down, limits, or suppresses but rather in what grows with and in it. The contagiousness of laughter drives the emergence of networked forms of feminism, bringing people together (although it may also create rifts). Sunden and Paasonen break new ground in exploring the intersection of networked feminism, humor, and affect, arguing for the political necessity of inappropriate laughter.

With the practices of art, science and technology increasingly converging, the concepts of origins and originality raise some of the most pressing questions in contemporary research, including issues of agency and accountability, hybridity and identity, intellectual property and oeuvre, intention and authority. These, and a constellation of related philosophical, economic, aesthetic, legislative and political concerns, are today subject to rapid reconfiguration due to the current pace of technological and theoretical change. Second Nature accordingly brings into a productive, interdisciplinary dialogue scholars working at the intersections of art, science and technology. Contributions explore how technologies of reproduction alter the meaning of concepts such as origin and originality, and how the borders between what we think of as "authentic" and "fake," "natural" and "artificial," are under constant negotiation and transformation. Interdisciplinary - and transdisciplinary - research demands rethinking our existing discursive and methodological orthodoxies. Second Nature arrives as a timely response, illuminating contemporary debates concerning digital and biological reproduction, nature and technology, art and authenticity, criticality and hybridity.