(Un)Doing Gender?

Abstract

Professional digital gaming has established itself as e-sport. The gendered usage of digital games has an impact on the social structure of participants in the professional realm: gamers, organizers, commentators and fans are mostly identified as white men. The background of this phenomena are streaming platforms, where harassment is experienced by most female identified gamers at some point. The community has never been silent about these problems, but how to deal with the gender gap in tournament participants is another question. Gender segregation can facilitate visibility and solidarity – but is this an unnecessary dramatization of the socially constructed line? Do these segregations maybe just reinforce stereotypes? What does it mean for female identified people to participate? And how do gaming communities react? The paper discusses problems and possibilities of female-only tournaments with vivid examples from different games and takes diverse perspectives of (female) gamers, fans and organizations into consideration, while pointing out crucial facts about the topic.