Dr. Sarah Stang is an Assistant Professor of Game Studies in Brock University’s Game Design program, housed in the Department of Digital Humanities. She is a feminist media scholar who specializes in analysing representation and identity in popular media, especially video games, and she received her PhD from the Communication & Culture program at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is also the Secretary for the International Communication Association’s Game Studies Division and the former Editor-in-Chief of the graduate student journal Press Start.

Sarah’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) funded dissertation, entitled “Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Abject Female Monstrosity in Roleplaying Games” and written under the supervision of Dr. Jennifer Jenson, is an intersectional feminist analysis of female monstrosity in popular (that is, critically acclaimed and commercially successful) sci-fi and fantasy video games. It unpacks how monstrosity in games functions as a way to symbolically represent marginalized or transgressive female bodies (particularly hybrid, pregnant, queer, disabled, mad, fat, and old bodies). This project combines feminist media studies (close reading the games themselves) with cultural studies (placing the monsters within a historical tradition of representing women’s bodies as monstrous) and internet research (examining player, developer, and critical discourse about these monstrous creatures).