Gendering Identity Talk: Gamers’ Gendered Constructions of Gamer Identity

ABSTRACT

Despite comprising roughly half of the gaming population and engaging in similar activities, women remain marginalized in gaming spaces. Previous scholarship has shown how cultural and subcultural gender conventions can serve to reproduce gender inequality in a range of social contexts. This article examines how video gamers used identity talk to gender themselves through the telling of self-narratives. Players represented themselves as gendered through narratives of play, framing similar gaming behaviors as either masculine or feminine. This retelling of gaming practices was rooted in larger, cultural meanings of gender, and in repackaging their gaming in gender-congruent manners, gamers reproduced gender within gaming spaces. Ultimately, this research presents how gamers maintained gaming as a social space dominated by men through their reproduction of a gender order that valued men’s play and minimized women’s play.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Douglas Schrock for his guidance and support throughout this project. I also thank Deana Rohlinger, Koji Ueno, Jennifer Proffitt, and Stephanie Orme for their helpful feedback on previous iterations of this article. Lastly, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editorial board members for their assistance in preparing this article for publication.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bertan Buyukozturk

Bertan Buyukozturk is a postdoctoral associate with the Department of Sociology at Florida State University. His research interests include gaming, social psychology, identity, culture, and social inequalities. His work broadly explores the construction of identity and inequality through digital, physical, and symbolic interaction. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews within collegiate gaming communities, integrating sociological approaches with game studies to explore player dynamics and the (re)production of dominant and marginalized identities in video game culture.