Sex and the Single Player

My current book project, Sex Machines: Play and Pornography in Indie Video Games, explore indie video games’ potential for disrupting normative understandings of what counts as porn and what counts as sex. Using aesthetic approaches that extend beyond pornographic conventions around explicitness and realism, the videogames I analyze take advantage of video games’ audiovisual-haptic affordances, playfully ‘plug into’ affectively intense debates about sex and technology, and help players feel their way through emerging sociosexual conundrums.

Psst! You can email me for copies of articles if you don’t have institutional access!

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

Ketterling, Jean. "Look Behind You! Playing with Sexual Surveillance in You Must be 18 or Older to Enter and how do you Do It?." Surveillance & Society. 22, no. 1 (2024): 25-40.

Desjardins, Bridgette, and Jean Ketterling. 2023. "'Running Makes Me Feel …': The Production of Emotion through Leisure." Leisure Studies, 43, no. 3 (2024): 477-490.

Desjardins, Bridgette M., Jean Ketterling, and Taryn Hepburn. "‘It's Not Fair!’: Constructing Gendered Legal Subjects via Trans-Exclusionary Sport Legislation." International Journal of Sport Policy and Politics 14, no. 4 (2022): 673-687.

Ketterling, Jean. "'You Do it for the Good Times': Rival Feminist Readings of Torture and Kink in Grand Theft Auto V." Feminist Media Studies 23, no. 7 (2022): 3452-3467.

Book Chapters

Ketterling, Jean. "Deplatforming Digital Sex: Self-Governing Sex in Video Games" In Handbook on Sex and Sexuality in Game Studies, edited by Matthew Wysocki and Steffi Shook. Bloomsbury. 2024 (forthcoming)

Ketterling, Jean. "Playing with Borders: Bringing Emotion into the Law Classroom Using Video Games." In Law, Video Games, Virtual Realities: Playing Law, edited by Dale Mitchell, Ashley Pearson, and Timothy Peters, pp. 133-153. Routledge. 2023.

Khan, Ummni, and Jean Ketterling. "Rape as Play: Yellow Peril Panic and a Defence of Fantasy." In The Asian Yearbook of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, pp. 357-395. Brill Nijhoff, 2019

Other Publications

Ketterling, Jean.“Ungrading Game Making: Incentivizing Creativity and Risk-Taking for Inexperienced Makers.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Dossier 10, no.3. (2024) [Editorial review]