In this paper, I endeavor to complicate the question of “What might women want to play?” by investigating my own affinity for Edmund McMillen’s The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth (Nicalis, 2014). Representationally, Isaac appears as a game that would be outright revolting to both feminine and feminist sensibilities. It’s gross-out, gory, and appears decidedly hostile towards women, playing on the well-worn Freudian Oedipus conflict with all its misogynistic anxieties of monstrous wombs and castrating mothers. As discussed in a number of previous analyses (Zachary, 2012; Dwan 2015; Batti 2015), Isaac appears closely related to Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theories of the abject and Barbara Creed’s (1993) related notion of the monstrous-feminine. However, in these analyses, the game’s exemplification of abjection relates primarily—if not exclusively—to its representational aspects. The conclusion that Isaac is misogynistic would be the product of one way of examining the meanings that the game may generate through its representation of abject femininity—but it is certainly not the meaning of the game.
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