ABSTRACT
Scholars and students of technical communication have a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the under-examined issues of gender, sex, and sexuality as they appear in video games. Constrained agency offers two important areas of intersection in the field of technical communication: first, constrained agency provides an understanding of the ways knowledge is constructed in and through discursive practices. In the second or more practical sense, the study of gender, sex, and sexuality can provide a pertinent framework with resonances for studying technical communication. Gender scholar Chris Weedon explains that discourses are "ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. The combination of play and performativity in the presence of perpetual scrutiny and assessment offers very credible means for considering gender, sex, sexuality, and particularly GLBTQ characters and themes.
