Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

My name is Manuela Valle-Castro, I was born in Chile and I am a newcomer to Treaty Six territory. I moved to Canada from Chile in 2005 looking to pursue graduate studies, and moved to Saskatchewan in 2014 with my two Canadian born daughters. As an international student and an immigrant, I have faced some social and cultural challenges and financial vulnerabilities; however, I am also aware of how my class privilege, if yet precarious, provided me with the choice to migrate here, voluntarily, and with more relative social and cultural capital than most immigrants in Canada. I was already fluent in English, had two university degrees, and had family financial resources to cover for most of the cost of the move and settling in Canada. Also, I encountered a country familiar with Chilean recent history and often sympathetic to Chileans. In Chile, I grew up under a military dictatorship until I was a teenager. The year before I was born, a military coup ended with the democratically ele

I had my first introduction to feminist gaming in Havana, Cuba.  It seems like an odd place for it, but I happened to meet a bunch of interesting characters the day before they were holding their first 'game jam' in Cuba on February 24th 2017. These folks are game designers/artists/geeks who meet outside the commercial circuit of games and are striving to foster creative and collaborative communities around alternative gaming. Thorsten Wiedemann runs the international festival A MAZE  with several locations around the world and was there to organize the event with local geeks Rodolfo Peraza and Jommi Barban from Fanguito Estudio . As a curious feminist, I attended without any expectations. And to my surprise, feminist revelations ensued from playing a game called UTE created by German game des igner Lea  Schőn felder. Now, let us be clear: I am not what you would call 'a gamer'. I had a Colecovision in the eighties where I mastered Donkey Kong Jr. and Saxxon, and I