While representations of gender have received attention for most media, stories, and games, the topic of gender in live action role-playing games (larps) is particularly important because of the degree of embodiment that is uniquely characteristic of the medium. When role-playing a (gendered) character, the player’s own body is at play, a fact that tends to constrain the performance, as both out-of-game and in-game expectations of attributes such as beauty, strength, leadership, and friendliness create restrictions on what is considered an authentic, true, or “real” performance of masculinity or femininity. This standard of believability in larp derives from powerful social norms and thus tends to reify the dominant gender binary of feminine=female and masculine=male as well as heterosexual relationships as the default. In this essay, we will explore the affordances of two approaches to writing and casting gendered characters in theatre-style larps in order to demonstrate how they each replicate or subvert dominant ideologies of gender and sexuality, and how larp may open a space for performances of possibility: a wider range of genders, sexualities, and bodies that portray them.
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