Violent Spectacle of the Wrong Body: Transphobia in The Last of Us, Part II

This is an article, not about trans representation, but about spectacular transphobic violence masquerading as trans representation in Naughty Dog’s 2020 video game, The Last of Us, Part II . In this game, reductive presumptions about transness stand in for critical engagements with trans experiences. Despite a complex overarching story, the narrative and character arcs involving trans people operate through what Hibby Thatch calls “‘wrong-body’ narrative[s],” which reduce trans stories to the refrain of being trapped in the wrong body. These narratives are problematic because, in seeking to make transness immediately legible to a cis audience, they operate through overly simplistic, visually engaging tropes. As a result, what these narratives end up presenting is not transness at all but cisnormative fears of transness: bodily mutilation, displacement of identity, and medical capture. Examining both the story and the mechanics of The Last of Us, Part II , I show that in spite of appearing affirming at first glance the most foundational part of the game’s worldbuilding is not nuanced trans representation but immediately recognizable transphobia for the purpose of provoking cis empathy. The fixation on making the character Lev immediately recognizable as trans to cis players creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in which his transness in the game world can become legible only through violent spectacle. The game’s narrow definition of transness also forecloses queer and gendered possibility in the character Ellie, whose character arc and gameplay mechanics are overdetermined by her foster father Joel. Rather than explore the messiness of queer and gender possibilities, her identity becomes entangled in a politics of displacement between her and Joel. The presumed fundamentality of spectacular violence against both Lev and Ellie’s othered bodies reveals an underlying cisnormative fantasy in which gendered violence persists past the end of the world.