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Jesse Gauthier

j.gauthier@queensu.ca

People Directory Affiliation Category
Graduate Students

 

Biography

Jesse Gauthier is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English Literature. His research examines queer subject formation under and against the conditions of authoritarian modernity. Working across modernist literature and contemporary video games, his dissertation considers how gender, sexuality, embodiment, and belonging are negotiated in relation to radical political formations, including authoritarianism, fascism, and communism. Its primary objects of study are D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Civil War love poems (1936), Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937), and Cyberpunk 2077 (2020).

His broader research interests include fascist aesthetics, queer theory, critical theory, posthumanism, and video game studies. His work has appeared in Feminist Modernist Studies, The Digital Review, and in edited collections with Routledge.

Research Interests

  • Modernism and modernity

  • Fascism, authoritarianism, and anti-fascism

  • Gender and sexuality

  • Queer theory

  • Critical theory

  • Political subjectivity

  • Embodiment and posthumanism

  • Video game studies and digital media

Selected Publications

  • “‘DO YOU HATE YOUR MEAT?’: Selling Bodily Transformation in Cyberpunk 2077.” The Digital Review, Fall 2026. youtu.be/C9zViTUrY94?si=cZ5FL0Lsmwr2Bf6p.

  • “Masculinity, Sexuality, and Radical Politics: The Entangled Discourses of D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.” Rewriting Gender in an Age of Transition, Routledge, 2026.

  • “Queer Time and Futurity in Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Victorians and Video Games, edited by Brooke Cameron and Lin Young, Routledge, 2025.

  • “The Queer Communism of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Spanish Civil War Love Poems.” Feminist Modernist Studies, 2025. 

Awards and Recognition

Ontario Graduate Scholarship
R. Samuel McLaughlin Fellowship
T. S. Eliot International Summer School Scholarship

Graduate Supervision

Glenn Willmott