Gender

Those accustomed to dismissing video games as frivolities may be alarmed to discover that, on a global scale, gaming generates more revenue than the film, music and book industries combined, by an order of magnitude. Games have become the dominant cultural force. We have come a long way since Space Invaders. Despite this prevalence and influence, there is a paucity of writing on gaming. Notable exceptions are Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022) and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One (2011), now joined by Carmen Maria Machado and J. Robert Lennon’s welcome collection of essays exploring the societal impact of the form.

Near the beginning of Wifedom, Anna Funder describes a disappearing trick whereby a male magician conjures away his female assistant. She uses this as a trope for history’s tendency to make women vanish: ‘Where has she gone?’ Funder asks. This invisibility is especially the case in relation to women and war. Not only are women’s roles in wars downplayed or ignored, but women’s writing on war is seldom regarded as ‘war literature’. As Donna Coates, the author of this newly published study, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend: Australian women’s war fictions, notes, the bookshelves at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra contain numerous books ‘by and about men at war’ and very few examples of women’s war writing.