Nothing but a “titty streamer”: legitimacy, labor, and the debate over women’s breasts in video game live streaming

ABSTRACT

Since the mid-2010s, live streaming has become an increasingly prominent facet of the cultural and commercial landscape of video games. Twitch, the largest streaming platform, reports that more than two million streamers broadcast on their site monthly. This article addresses gender-based harassment in video game live streaming, a widespread problem, especially for women streamers. Here, we deconstruct the discriminatory discourse that surrounds the bodies of women streamers, with a focus on the term “titty streamer.” “Titty streamer” is a derogatory label applied by detractors to women streamers who are perceived as drawing undeserved attention from viewers by presenting their bodies in sexualized ways. To delineate and critique how this term is being deployed in the cultures that surround Twitch, we perform a qualitative analysis of comments in forum threads in the Twitch subreddit (r/Twitch). Our analysis reveals that the term “titty streamer” is far more than a dismissible, juvenile insult. The term serves as a window onto underlying cultural logics and anxieties from within gamer culture about labor and legitimacy in live streaming, as well as larger issues of how women’s bodies are perceived, performed, and policed in and through video games.

KEYWORDS:

• Video games
• live streaming
• harassment
• gender
• women
• breasts

ORCID

Amanda L. L. Cullen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4064-0438

Notes

1 This article contains discussions of gender-based harassment and quotations from remarks that deploy sexualized, body-shaming rhetoric and discriminatory language about sex work.