Abstract

This thesis describes the social practice of Erotic Role Play (ERP) as an assemblage through which the “transfag” as a subject is produced. This project does so by hewing together the multidisciplinary practices of games studies, trans studies, and fan studies. Moreover, I apply an autoethnographic practice, supplanting my own experiences as an expert-hobbyist throughout my thesis. This writing practice aligns with both games studies approaches by authors like TL Taylor as well as trans studies scholars like Susan Stryker, and calls attention to how both hobbyist and trans perspectives require personal and biographical intervention due to lack of scholarship. I suggest that, in order to better understand transmasculine subjects who ERP in the video game Final Fantasy XIVI (and by extension any other subject), one must juggle the “incommensurable” or seemingly incompatible nodes within the assemblage rather than “settle” them: transmasculine ERPing must be both a queer practice of cruising and a communal writing practice informed by fan spaces. Moreover, I not only resist the simplification of transmasc ERPers, but also disrupt the ways in which academia has thought of the transmasculine subject: as a limb of lesbianism, or through the lens of amateur queer porn or memoir. Instead, the transfag ERPer is a hacked-together machine whose desires are circuited through ERP and spaces which have historically been studied as exclusively female.