This article interrogates Portal’s monstrous antagonist GLaDOS through a psychoanalytical lens, granting specific attention to her maternal coding. The process of presenting maternal authority as monstrous and in need of containment is a patriarchal practice that reinforces the mother gamer’s unwelcome presence within video game culture, outlined through a brief examination of various representational trends regarding the maternal figure in games. These patriarchal signifying practices also operate to preserve broader domestic and societal gendered ideologies. Portal’s projections of maternal monstrousness are located within its villain’s taunting dialogue and her all-pervasive presence within the unsettling game space, representative of the reabsorbing maternal body. The application of Julia Kristeva’s abjection theory and Barbara Creed’s faces of the “monstrous-feminine” inform these observations and the construction of GLaDOS as an abject, abusive, and archaic mother.

Despite the encouragement of women’s and girls’ curiosity in matriarchal and oral fairy tale traditions, their patriarchal print production in Western Europe reframed this trait as undesirable. Fairy tale print productions also troubled the tales’ transformative and communal form in establishing versions that would receive ongoing duplication by attaching prominent authorial figures. In this article, I investigate the teen girl detective game as a format that reflects upon and updates these values. Taking Mografi’s Jenny LeClue: Detectivú as my case study, I interpret the text as a postmodern fairy tale revision that unsettles the master narrative and the notion of the singular authorial figure. The game encourages the player’s active investigatory participation while presenting a narrative that invites collaboration and a critique of the conservative author.

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