A Gender Deconstruction of "Portal" - A Parody

Portal is apparently some form of video game. If I played games, I might have known this without having to look it up. Anyway, allysaundre posted a very cool deconstruction parody of the game using all the requisite pomo lit-crit gender language. Very entertaining. And brilliant.

Here is an excerpt:

Isn't gaming just another art form? The short answer is no, it is not. Many, however, have taken up this idea with little critical reflection and treat gaming as if objective value judgements can be made of it (to a small extent, they are right, but not enough as entertainment is the central value).

Others have gone further and adopted the waste produce of literary criticism to it (maybe to add legtimacy to the claims). One such waste product is Jacques Derrida and here is an effort which is either a parody or a serious act of phenomenal idiocy. I'll take it as the later here and treat it accordingly for my own parody:

He is entirely wrong beyond the first paragraph on the name. The gun is inevitably a symbol of female agency. As radical masculinists show us, there is a complex matriarchy that works through as subtler agency. The gun is more accurately fitted to the female genitalia, because of its birthing aspect. It is shaped similar to the birth canal and it birthes the agent of death (remembering that death has been personified as a female agency in many things from Slavic and Celtic folklores all the way down to postmodern geniuses like Neil Gaiman). Remember that children (bore from the womb) often represent a loss of personal freedom for the parents and the bullet represents the absolute loss of freedom, therefore the gun represents the objectification of the agency of the matriarchy and the idealised form of female genitalia.

Since militarism is, as seen from the above, an agency imposed upon men by the matriarchy, men cannot choose militarism. Militarism is thus the female-acting-through-the-male, the male becomes the instrument of the matriarchy, which is the Self to the male's Other. The real Self and, therefore, the real gendered view, is female.

The PCs in FPS games are almost always men turned into the instrument of objectifying and making Other males through the agency of the females, i.e. the matriarchy. In Portal, however, we see the matriarchy taking a full hand because it is not stated that the character is male or female unless one passes a mirror or somesuch. The character's lack of overt sexuality indicates she represents the matriarchy directly, as the normally sexualised females are symbolic of feminity's power to subtly objectify men through the use of sex (as in pornography, which should be banned as a symbol of matriarchal oppression via the control of men).

Go read the rest of the post.

Tags: Deconstruction, Portal, A Parody, humor, gender roles, culture, games, matriarchy, female-acting-through-the-male