THIS IS HOW SHE FUCKING GOT HER MASTERS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
Her writing, structure, and flow are abhorrent. This is every young-adult smut-literature book smudged into one.
Here is the file itself, not that I would expect that link to go dead or anything (but who knows).
God, the abstract is just -- this is how this person types:
This thesis describes the social practice of Erotic Role Play (ERP) as an assemblage through which the “transfag” as a subject is produced. This project does so by hewing together the multidisciplinary practices of games studies, trans studies, and fan studies. Moreover, I apply an autoethnographic practice, supplanting my own experiences as an expert-hobbyist throughout my thesis. This writing practice aligns with both games studies approaches by authors like TL Taylor as well as trans studies scholars like Susan Stryker, and calls attention to how both hobbyist and trans perspectives require personal and biographical intervention due to lack of scholarship. I suggest that, in order to better understand transmasculine subjects who ERP in the video game Final Fantasy XIVI (and by extension any other subject), one must juggle the “incommensurable” or seemingly incompatible nodes within the assemblage rather than “settle” them: transmasculine ERPing must be both a queer practice of cruising and a communal writing practice informed by fan spaces. Moreover, I not only resist the simplification of transmasc ERPers, but also disrupt the ways in which academia has thought of the transmasculine subject: as a limb of lesbianism, or through the lens of amateur queer porn or memoir. Instead, the transfag ERPer is a hacked-together machine whose desires are circuited through ERP and spaces which have historically been studied as exclusively female.
I did not remove line or paragraph breaks. They're just not there. I understand that, to some extent, the structure of an abstract is limiting by design -- but this is rambling inanity and ineptitude. This is a level of writing I would expect of a freshman high-school student who had never written a research paper before:
Many academics have outlined the importance of fandom and communities of play but there has been very little writing about ERP’s position within the community, especially within gay transmasculine role playing communities.
A comma is inappropriate here - you would use a dash. A high-schooler might use a comma, yes, but I'd expect more of someone with a master's. It's missing a comma between gay & transmasculine, and "role playing communities" is awkward phrasing that obviously needs to either be "roleplaying" or "role-playing." Control-F shows that the author is
not consistent in the way they construct it.
I propose ERP generates research questions sexuality studies, video game studies, nor trans studies can answer on their own.
By not writing this as "research questions
that sexuality studies[...]" the phrasing is abhorrent and it just doesn't read well at all.
By focusing my study on this condensed network, I will be able to help broaden the scope of what “play” looks like (in video games studies) as well as what “queer culture” looks like (in relation to trans studies).
"In relation to trans studies" does not need to be in parenthesis. It does not need any form of demarcation from the rest of the sentence, as "[...] looks like in relation to [...]" is completely normal phraseology.
This is a genuine embarrassment and doesn't deserve in any way to be called 'scholarship.' This is someone's thesis for a Master's degree who neither enjoys reading nor writing - unless, I guess, it involves bottom-of-the-barrel smut. The person writing this probably has loaded parents and some kind of genuine learning disability -- so it's a little cruel to be mocking this, but it's even more cruel to be entertaining this farce for such a long, long time.
