Thresholds & Unstable Boundaries: A Research through Design Exploration of Queer Embodiment in Virtual Reality
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2025
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This doctoral research explores the design of embodied experiences for Virtual Reality. It introduces a novel queer methodology for VR and includes a practice outcome that showcases the approaches and insights of this methodology. Two key texts—Queer Phenomenology by Sara Ahmed (2006) and Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia (2009)—form the basis of the queer theoretical lens used to explore two linked research questions. The first question takes a queer perspective to analyse histories of embodiment in the medium of VR; the second question focuses on how queer ways of working with digital technologies can be used to craft new possibilities for embodiment within VR.
This thesis contributes to design scholarship and practice by introducing the much-needed critical voices of queer and cyberfeminist theory to existing approaches for designing and developing VR. This research also contributes to the field of queer theory by presenting a novel manifestation of textual queer knowledge via the experiential medium of VR.
The practice-based outcome, the Body Traces Archive, is a 10-minute prototype VR experience that creates a queerly inflected embodied experience by inviting participants to create gooey digital traces of themselves, which accumulate in a slimy communal ecosystem.
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