This entrenchment is vital to understanding Kerrigan as a tragic character caught in cycles of violence who uses this violence to collapse the symbolic order through the only means she understands. Kerrigan is, however, an ambiguous character, and… she is entrenched within patriarchal control structures even as she fights to resist them” (2019, p.
As Stang argues, “allowing players to embody the monstrous-feminine could be read as a progressive move and a decentering of patriarchal ideology.
#Starcraft kerrigan series
Kerrigan, then, is an important point of discussion in this growing body of work as a rare example of the playable monstrous-feminine.Įngaging with Kristeva’s concept of the abject and Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine, as well as game scholars employing these concepts including Spittle, Sarkeesian, and Stang, I explore the representation of monstrous-feminine agency through the character of Kerrigan in the StarCraft series with emphasis on StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm ( Blizzard, 2013). However, there is a growing confluence of these two fields that studies female monstrosity in games ( Santos & White, 2005 Sarkeesian, 2016b Spittle, 2011 Stang, 2018, 2019 Stang & Trammell, 2019 Taylor, 2006 Trépanier-Jobin & Bonenfant, 2017). The former examines how video games center around male characters while often under-representing or perpetuating problematic tropes of female characters ( Cassell & Jenkins, 1998 Chess, 2018 Kennedy, 2002 Murray, 2018 Sarkeesian, 2013–2017 Shaw, 2017 Walkerdine, 2007), while the latter explores female monstrosity in film and literature ( Creed, 1986, 1993 Caputi, 2004 Halberstam, 1995 Pulliam, 2014). This analysis is grounded in feminist game scholarship and the monstrous-feminine. In this article, I examine how Kerrigan remediates the monstrous-feminine characters of literature and film while offering new grounds for understanding the monstrous-feminine within the connection between a player and player-character. Despite her monstrous form, she is often hypersexualized even as her monstrous-feminine agency suggests a certain degree of social progress. The playable monstrous-feminine character, Sarah Kerrigan, is an example of a new version of the monstrous-feminine who is arguably empowered by both her position in the narrative as a central force and as a player-character. However, the StarCraft series ( Blizzard Entertainment, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, 2010, 2013, 2015a, 2015b, 2017) offers the rare opportunity to reposition the engagement with the monstrous-feminine by allowing the player to embody the monstrous-feminine herself. Most games position the engagement with the monstrous-feminine by allowing the player to embody often white, male protagonists who fight against and kill these monsters. While initially discussed through literary and film scholarship, the abject and the monstrous-feminine describe horror tropes commonly remediated in video games.
The discussion concludes that Kerrigan’s connection between the player and monstrous-feminine character is a significant paradigm shift for the female monster and how agency and empathy allow players to understand the monstrous-feminine in a new perspective. The author then explores the obstacles Kerrigan must overcome and how this struggle reifies her disruption of and resistance against the symbolic order. The article begins examining Kerrigan through the lens of the monstrous-feminine and the abject before discussing how her hypersexualization ostensibly contradicts her monstrosity as an empowering force. Kerrigan’s subjectivity as a player-character complicates her in ways that require a different application of the monstrous-feminine from those characters from literature, film, and video games that position them as enemies to overcome. This article explores the representation of monstrous-feminine agency through the character of Kerrigan in the StarCraft series with emphasis on StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm.