This study utilizes semiotic phenomenology as a method of inquiry to describe the lived experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) gamers (gaymers). I begin by discussing my issues with the current gaming literature, arguing that the gamer community is a space that privileges cis, heterosexual, and hypermasculine men while oppressing those who may not fit this mold. I discuss the shortcomings of the current literature that attempts to critically look at race and gaming, noting that race in the gaming community is still portrayed as secondary. I focus special attention to how this space allows for more inclusion than the larger gamer and LGBTQ communities while also critiquing those whom this space privileges. Through interviews of members of the local gaymer organization, the Phoenix Gaymers, I discuss ways in which the gaymer community is more inclusive and conscious of others but still follows forms of what I describe to be gaymer privilege. I focus on gaymer privilege within the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, where I argue from the phenomenological descriptions, reductions, and interpretations that there are still overt issues of sexism and transphobia as well as implicit issues of white privilege. While I describe the issues that are found within the Phoenix Gaymers, I also attempt to provide suggestions for change within the organization as well as in academic scholarship to create more awareness and inclusion for female, transgender, genderqueer, and queer people of color gaymers.

Performance is a public speech act that can present the experience of difference and generate relations across lines of difference. In personal narrative performance, performers do not just tell stories, the stories they tell are strategic hailings that call attention to discourses that produce the conditions of their exclusion and form intimate relations in public. Personal narrative performance renders the private public. Performers take to the stage, the space of the public, to offer their stories, their bodies, and their relations to audiences for collective consideration. In turn, the act of performance generates further relations: among performers and audiences, and between performance and discourse. This study analyzes these two layers of relation in performance through looking at the ways neoliberalism and performance interanimate one another. Through looking at three sites of neoliberal relationality--same-sex marriage, family, and immigration and multiculturalism, it asks questions of how performers narrate and represent non-normative experiences within neoliberalism, the historical and cultural context through which they are living and narrating. In order to understand the cultural work, the resistive and relational potential, of the relations that occur in and through personal narrative performance, we also need to understand the political, cultural, and historical conditions under which narratives in performance are produced. My argument is that in and through performance intimacy is queered: it takes the private--the stuff of the personal presented as aesthetic communication--and renders that private very public. In public and through relations, performance can raise awareness and shift consciousness, reify orders of relation or generate alternate imaginaries. This is to say that a lot of different types of work are done in performance, and although performance is often seen as resistance, under the weight of neoliberalism, it is important to tend to what arguments performances are making and how in turn that shapes the relations that occur in the site of performance. Queer intimacy offers a way of engaging performance, an analytic that considers the text of performance as well as the relational context among performers and audiences, and turns back on larger cultural questions of belonging. The potential of performance, of the concept of queer intimacy, provides a lens to read performance, to tend to the conditions that give rise to and inform performance in the current historical moment. It brings together the critical impulse of intercultural communication and cultural studies with performance studies. From a critical cultural perspective, it tends to the structural in performance, and through performance emphasizes the lived experience as narrated and embodied as and through communication. Coupled with the impulses of queer theory, queer intimacy offers both resisting normativity and imagining beyond it. To consider queer intimacy in performance is not only to recognize that relations are made possible, but to tend closely to the belongings we are making.