Nintendo Switch-ing Genders: Bowsette and the Potentiality of Transgender Video Game Mechanics

Abstract

In 2018, Nintendo announced a re-release of the game New Super Mario Bros. U. To make the title appealing to returning players, the company added series staple Toadette as a new playable character, alongside a never-before-seen power-up called the Super Crown. Once obtained, this item would transform Toadette into a facsimile version of the franchise’s damsel in distress, Princess Peach. This functionality whipped the Internet into a frenzy and led to the creation of Bowsette, a fan character who imagines what would happen if series antagonist Bowser donned the crown and switched genders. As Bowsette ascended to superstardom, two aspects of her reception stood out: the frequent characterization of her as a transgender woman, and the fact that the Super Crown is the only feature carried over from the re-released game to Bowsette. This article holds that these two facts are connected, arguing that the queering of the Super Crown originated from the mechanical conceit of the power-up itself. Despite not being tied to any visible LGBTQ representation within the game, the item functions as a transgender video game mechanic, which allows it to reconfigure assumed-stable cisgender imagery by intimating non-normativity through experiential means. By picking up on and highlighting the Super Crown’s ludic attributes in non-ludic mediums, Bowsette challenges representation’s status as the dominant arbiter of gender in our modern world, inviting us to consider the possibilities unlocked by reconfiguring gender on mechanical as opposed to visual grounds.

Keywords:

• ludology
• Mario
• Peachette
• reparativity
• representation

Disclosure Statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 Aric Sweeny, “Nintendo Announces ‘New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe,’” Destructoid.com, September 13, 2018, https://www.nintendo.destructoid.com/nintendo-announces-new-super-mario-bros-u-deluxe/ (accessed November 11, 2022).

2 Ana Valens, “Fans Think Luigi May Be Transgender,” DailyDot.com, January 7, 2019, https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/luigi-transgender-bowsette-twitter/ (accessed November 11, 2022).

3 haniwa (@ayyk92), “The Super Crown’s Some Spicy New Mario Lore,” Twitter, September 19, 2018, 12:27 p.m., https://twitter.com/ayyk92/status/1042465252221181954 (accessed November 11, 2022).

4 haniwa (@ayyk92), “Super Crown.”

5 Emma Kent, “Moments of 2018: Bowsette, or When Nintendo Proved No-one Can Subvert It Like Itself,” Eurogamer.net, December 31, 2018, https://www.eurogamer.net/moments-of-2018-bowsette-or-when-nintendo-proved-no-one-can-subvert-it-like-itself (accessed November 11, 2022).

6 spookyaxolotl, “Bowsette is a Trans Icon and There’s Nothing You Can Do About It,” Reddit, September 24, 2018, 9:14 a.m., https://www.reddit.com/r/traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns/comments/9ii9go/bowsette_is_a_trans_icon_and_theres_nothing_you/ (accessed November 11, 2022).

7 Natalie Ophelia McGloin (Nat Bat Memes), “Inside You There’s an ENBY and a Trans Girl,” Facebook, September 29, 2022, 3:53 p.m., https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1807591672939040&set=g.2152422041511737 (accessed November 11, 2022); Quinton Reviews (@Q_Review), “happy anniversary #transrights,” Twitter, September 19, 2020, 2:39 p.m., https://twitter.com/Q_Review/status/1307403900849451009 (accessed November 11, 2022).

8 r/Bowsette, “r/Bowsette Rules,” https://www.reddit.com/r/bowsette/ (accessed November 11, 2022).

9 Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm, “Identity, Representation, and Video Game Studies beyond the Politics of the Image,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 1.

10 Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 1.

11 Malkowski and Russworm, “Identity, Representation, and Video Game Studies,” 2.

12 Jennifer Malkowski, “I Turned Out to be Such a Damsel in Distress: Noir Games and the Unrealized Femme Fatale,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).

13 Gabrielle Trépanier-Jobin, “Video Game Parodies: Appropriating Video Games to Criticize Gender Norms,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 90–105, 92.

14 Bo Ruberg, “Trans Game Studies,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 2 (2022): 202.

15 Evelyn Deshane and R. Travis Morton, “The Big Reveal: Exploring (Trans)Femininity in Metroid,” in Queerness in Play, ed. Todd Harper, Meghan Blythe Adams, and Nicholas Taylor (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 131–46.

16 Chris Lawrence, “What If Zelda Wasn’t a Girl? Problematizing Ocarina of Time’s Great Gender Debate,” in Queerness in Play, ed. Todd Harper, Meghan Blythe Adams, and Nicholas Taylor (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 97–113.

17 Meghan Blythe Adams, “Bye, Bye, Birdo: Heroic Androgyny and Villainous Gender-Variance in Video Games,” in Queerness in Play, ed. Todd Harper, Meghan Blythe Adams, and Nicholas Taylor (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 147.

18 Malkowski and Russworm, “Identity, Representation, and Video Game Studies,” 3.

19 Anna Anthropy, ZZT (Los Angeles: Boss Fight Books, 2014), 70.

20 Anthropy, ZZT, 70.

21 Andi McClure, “Algorithms, Accidents, and the Queerness of Abstraction,” in The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games, ed. Bo Ruberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 79.

22 Edmond Y. Chang, “Queergaming,” in Queer Game Studies, ed. Bo Ruberg and Adrienne Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 16.

23 Bo Ruberg, “Hungry Holes and Insatiable Balls: Video Games, Queer Mechanics, and the Limits of Design,” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 3 (2022),107–8.

24 Ruberg, “Hungry Holes and Insatiable Balls, 107–8.

25 Alan Latham, “Research, Performance, and Doing Human Geography: Some Reflections on the Diary-Photograph, Diary-Interview Method,” Environment and Planning A 35 (2003): 2000.

26 Ruberg, “Hungry Holes and Insatiable Balls,” 128.

27 haniwa (@ayyk92), “Super Crown.”

28 For further discussion of this concept, see Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Journal of Women's History 15, no. 3 (2003): 11–48.

29 Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 10.

30 Malatino, Side Affects, 14–16.

31 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 150–51.

32 For more, see John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972) and Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18.

33 As one useful example, see leo-se, “Bowsette x Princess Peach (skello) [mario],” Reddit, October 29, 2021, 4:13 a.m., https://www.reddit.com/r/Bowsette_Porn/comments/qi8pmg/bowsette_x_princess_peach_skello_mario/ (accessed November 11, 2022).

34 Matthew Hester, “Her Phallic Sword: Hypersexual Cyberqueer Activism on Social Media Platforms,” in LGBTQ Digital Cultures: A Global Perspective, ed. Paromita Pain (New York: Routledge, 2022), 175.

35 Eric Zimmerman and Heather Chaplin, “Manifesto: The 21st Century Will Be Defined By Games,” Kotaku.com, September 9, 2013, https://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204 (accessed November 11, 2022).

36 Shaw, Gaming at the Edge, ix.

37 McClure, “Algorithms, Accidents,” 79.

38 Alexis Sara, “Bowsette Made You Trans?,” Tumblr, September 25, 2018, https://thinkingalexis.tumblr.com/post/178449175320/bowsette-made-you-trans (accessed November 11, 2022).

39 Sara, “Bowsette Made You Trans?”

40 Sara, “Bowsette Made You Trans?”

41 Chang, “Queergaming,” 15.

42 Ruberg, “Hungry Holes and Insatiable Balls,” 128.

43 Bo Ruberg, “Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games,” in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and Treaandrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 92.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennessa Hester

JENNESSA HESTER is a transgender scholar and poet working out of Lubbock, Texas, USA, and a member of the Department of English, Texas Tech University. Her work focuses on the intersection between embodiment, personal identity, community identity, and various forms of media, both classical and cutting edge. In addition to her research, Jennessa serves as a managing editor for the Iron Horse Literary Review, assistant editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and poetry editor for Wrong Publishing. [email protected]