Skip to main content
Disciplines
Automotive Business IT + Informatics Construction + Real Estate Electrical Engineering + Electronics Energy + Sustainability Insurance + Risk Finance + Banking Management + Leadership Marketing + Sales Mechanical Engineering + Materials
Events
DE
EN
Books
Journals
Topic Page
Marketing
Start single access now
Access for companies
EXTENDED SEARCH
Log in
Top
Published in:
Introduction: Reframing Hegemonic Conceptions of Women and Feminism in Gaming Culture Read chapter Read first chapter

2018 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

11. Doing/Undoing Gender with the Girl Gamer in High-Performance Play

Author : Emma Witkowski

Published in: Feminism in Play

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Log in

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config
loading …

Abstract

This chapter explores the actions and experiences of women who participate in esports and high-performance cultures of play. Across networked game scenes, women are regularly framed as “girl gamers.” A stigmatising term placed on the women who play games as a high-performance practice. Through qualitative research, players and esports content producers account for how the girl gamer is lived and produced, reflecting on what the term means for their everyday participation. Inter-related pressure nodes include the ongoing negotiation of gendered embodiment in networked cultures, traditional marketing economies, and the institutional power of a male-dominated field. How the girl gamer identity is positioned and engaged with across high-performance game scenes highlights how gender modulates activity, experience, and practice across careers of networked play.

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 102.000 Bücher
  • über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
  • Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Finance + Banking
  • Management + Führung
  • Marketing + Vertrieb
  • Versicherung + Risiko




Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

  • über 67.000 Bücher
  • über 390 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

  • Automobil + Motoren
  • Bauwesen + Immobilien
  • Business IT + Informatik
  • Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
  • Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
  • Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe




 

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now
previous chapter With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Video Game Live Streaming and Its Potential Risks and Benefits for Female Gamers
next chapter The Magic Circle and Consent in Gaming Practices
Footnotes
1
Connell refers to emphasised femininity a form of “women’s compliance” in their subordination to men, by way of “accommodating the interests and desires of men” (1987, 183).
 
2
High performance players are those participating at an elite level of computer game play and are involved in expert communities of practice.
 
3
Maxim is an international men’s magazine whose front page customarily displays scantily clad images of prominent women.
 
4
Media sports refer to a slice of a high performance sports cultures which are maintained by the interrelationship between mainstream media, advertising/sponsors, and professional sporting institutions.
 
5
Stebbins’ concept of serious leisure, while sitting within positive taxonomy of leisure, usefully highlights the pleasure of a dedicated and systematically pursued activity “… that people find so substantial, interesting and fulfilling that … they launch themselves on a (leisure) career centred on acquiring and expressing a combination of its special skills, knowledge and experience” (2007, 6). While such conditions are dimensions of an esports career, so too are what Rojek describes as “the real conditions of human striving” (2010, p. 116), which includes less celebratory aspects of a serious leisure lifestyle tied to for-profit corporations.
 
6
The interviewees taking part in this research are all fluent English speakers (first or second language), located in North American or Northern Europe, and identify as cisgender, White or Asian American.
 
7
During 2010–2015, there were few women of colour represented on esports scenes in visible roles.
 
8
Such as traditional media sports masculinity upheld at esports events and the employment of booth babes.
 
9
Ddosing is a Distributed Denial-of-Service attack. An attack disrupts a personal computer/user by flooding it with multiple requests, leaving the machine unavailable for networked use.
 
10
Gray’s ethnographic work in Xbox Live, which requires voice communication, reveals how voice impacts on racial and gender equality within play, “… this mere technological advance [voice communication over traditional chat function] creates the most havoc in their virtual lives—racial and gendered inequality based of how they sound” (2013, para. 6).
 
11
See for example the diversity in esports advocacy organisation “AnyKey.”
 
12
Smart cast is a keyboard shortcut that casts an ability on the nearest enemy target, instead of mouse targeting.
 
13
World-first raiding involves select teams of 10–25 players attempting to be the first in the world to defeat newly released game content.
 
14
This is certainly not to say that gender is disregarded completely, either positively or negatively. As Quirico notes, not “doing gender” while playing at all-female tournaments doesn’t omit sharing gendered experiences with those who struggle with the same issues, and as such make playing “feel normal” (ESL 2015).
 
15
Which include gender policing (as seen at the Garena eSports tournament, Philippines); limited fields/events of participation for women (such as the IeSF HearthStone tournament held at The Assembly, Finland); and narrow diversity within governing institutions.
 
Literature
Beavis, Catherine, and Claire Charles. 2007. Would the ‘Real’ Girl Gamer Please Stand Up? Gender, LAN Cafés and the Reformulation of the ‘Girl’ Gamer. Gender and Education 19 (6): 691–705.CrossRef
Bordo, Susan. 1992. The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity: A Feminist Appropriation of Foucault. In Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions and Being and Knowing, ed. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo, 13–33. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Press.
Brownmiller, Susan. 1984. Femininity. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Chess, Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. 2015. A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #Gamergate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59 (1): 208–220.CrossRef
Christensen, Natasha C. 2006. Geeks at Play: Doing Masculinity in an Online Gaming. Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 6 (1).
Connell, Raewyn. 1987. Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford Press.
Connell, R.W., and James Messerschmidt. 2005. Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender Society 19: 829–859.CrossRef
Disch, Lisa, and Mary Jo Kane. 1996. When a Looker Is Really a Bitch: Lisa Olson, Sport, and the Heterosexual Matrix. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 21 (2): 278–308.CrossRef
Gray, Kishonna. 2013. Collective Organizing, Individual Resistance, or Asshole Griefers? An Ethnographic Analysis of Women of Color in Xbox Live. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 2.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2006. In Praise of Athletic Beauty. New York: Harper Perennial.
Jones, Amelia. 2003. Introduction: Conceiving the Intersection of Feminism and Visual Culture. In The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Amelia Jones, 1–8. London and New York: Routledge.
Kennedy, Helen W. 2006. Illegitimate, Monstrous and Out There: Female ‘Quake’ Players and Inappropriate Pleasures. In Feminism in Popular Culture, ed. Jonanne Hollows and Roberta Pearson, 183–201. Oxford: Berg.
Messner, Michael. 2007. Out of Play: Critical Essays on Gender and Sport. New York, NY: SUNY.
Rojek, Chris. 2010. The Labour of Leisure: The Culture of Free Time. London: Sage.
Rose, Gillian. 2013. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Oxford: Wiley.
Stebbins, Robert. 2007. Serious Leisure. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Taylor, Nicholas. 2009. Power Play: Digital Gaming Goes Pro. PhD dissertations, York University.
Taylor, Nicholas, Jen Jenson, and Suzanne De Castell. 2009. Cheerleaders/Booth Babes/Halo Hoes: Pro-gaming, Gender and Jobs for the Boys. Digital Creativity 20 (4): 239–252.CrossRef
Taylor, T.L. 2006. Play Between Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 2012. Raising the Stakes: The Rise of Professional Computer Gaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
White, Michele. 2015. Producing Women: The Internet, Traditional Femininity, Queerness, and Creativity. New York, NY: Routledge.CrossRef
Witkowski, Emma. 2012. Inside the Huddle: The Phenomenology and Sociology of Team Play in Networked Computer Games. PhD dissertation, IT University of Copenhagen.
———. 2013. Eventful Masculinities: Negotiations of Hegemonic Sporting Masculinities at LANs. In Sports Videogames, ed. Mia Consalvo, Konstantin Mitgutsch, and Abe Stein, 217–235. New York, NY: Routledge.
Metadata
Title
Doing/Undoing Gender with the Girl Gamer in High-Performance Play
Author
Emma Witkowski
Copyright Year
2018
Book
Feminism in Play

Print ISBN: 978-3-319-90538-9

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-319-90539-6

Copyright Year: 2018

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90539-6_11