ABSTRACT

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus’s political marketing campaign in Donald Trump’s Nazi-ridden America would seem to make a feminist intervention, and its gameplay and representations likewise appear to challenge the sexist and normative framework and mechanisms of the first-person shooter war game. This chapter, however, reveals the ways in which its ostensibly progressive aim falls short of its mark. While acknowledging the strides the videogame makes in depicting empowered women, this study nevertheless recognizes the troublesome objectification that takes shape through aligning the player with the active avatar. This masculine figure’s narrative of disability likewise begins in a manner that challenges orthodox gameplay, but its eventual tragic framing advances a self-sufficient, able-bodied, classical male as the archetypal heroic norm, thereby disregarding disability and failing to uphold this intersectional feminist challenge to masculine hegemony. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the game’s political relation to the wider Bethesda cannon and looks toward forthcoming games in the Wolfenstein franchise for hope of an actualized feminist vision.