Women in videogames & further feminist theory

 Part 1: Background reading on Gamergate

Read this Guardian article on Gamergate 10 years on. Answer the following questions:

1) What was Gamergate? 

Gamergate was an online harassment campaign that began in 2014, primarily targeting women in the video game industry, including developers like Zoë Quinn and feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian. The campaign was fueled by misogyny, anti-feminism, and anti-progressivism, and involved widespread online harassment from internet trolls on platforms

2) What is the recent controversy surrounding narrative design studio Sweet Baby Inc? 

The recent controversy is that Sweet Baby Inc is secretly forcing game developers to change the bodies, ethnicities and sexualities of video game characters to conform to “woke” ideology. They think that Sweet Baby has written and controlled almost every popular video game of the past five years, shutting straight white men out.

3) What does the article conclude regarding diversity in videogames?

They conclude that nobody is forcing diversity into video games. It is happening naturally, as players and developers themselves diversify. The games industry knows that a greater breadth of content, featuring a greater breadth of characters, made with the contributions of a greater breadth of people, is good for creativity and for business, no matter what some aggrieved gamers may think. This time, it must make its support perfectly and unequivocally clear.

Part 2: Further Feminist Theory: Media Factsheet

Use our Media Factsheet archive on the M: drive Media Shared (M:\Resources\A Level\Media Factsheets) or here using your Greenford Google login. Find Media Factsheet #169 Further Feminist Theory, read the whole of the Factsheet and answer the following questions:

1) What definitions are offered by the factsheet for ‘feminism ‘and ‘patriarchy’?

Feminism is a movement which aims for equality for women – to be treated as equal to men socially, economically, and politically. It is a movement that is focused not on ‘hating’ men, or suggesting that women are superior. Instead, feminism is focused on highlighting the power and suppressive nature of the patriarchy (male dominance in society). Feminists see the patriarchy as a limitation to women receiving the same treatment and benefits as their male counterparts.

2) Why did bell hooks publish her 1984 book ‘Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center’?

hooks used her work to offer a more inclusive feminists theory that advocated for women within a sisterhood to acknowledging and accepting their differences.

3) What aspects of feminism and oppression are the focus for a lot of bell hooks’s work?

 These individual identities can include gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, age, mental disability, physical disability, mental illness, physical illness. These various aspects of identity are not mutually exclusive, instead they are working together to construct a new identity.

4) What is intersectionality and what does hooks argue regarding this?

bell hooks argues that experiences of class, gender, sexuality etc cannot be completely understood if the influences of racialisation are not considered. hooks argues that understanding intersectionality is vital to gaining political and social equality and improving our democratic system. hook describes intersectionality as something which can create and maintain systems of oppression and class domination.

5) What did Liesbet van Zoonen conclude regarding the relationship between gender roles and the mass media?

Van Zoonen concludes that there is a strong relationship between gender (stereotypes, pornography and ideology) and communication, but it is also the mass media that leads to much of the observable gender identity structures in advertising, film and TV.

6) Liesbet van Zoonen sees gender as socially constructed. What does this mean and which other media theorist we have studied does this link to?

Van Zoonen has a postmodernist understanding of science as something which is socially

constructed and grounded in the social experiences of its practitioners.

7) How do feminists view women’s lifestyle magazines in different ways? Which view do you agree with?

feminists have criticised women’s magazines as commercial sites of exaggerated femininity which serve to pull women into a consumer culture on the promise that the products they buy will alleviate their own bodily insecurities and low self-esteem.

8) In looking at the history of the colours pink and blue, van Zoonen suggests ideas gender ideas can evolve over time. Which other media theorist we have studied argues things evolve over time and do you agree that gender roles are in a process of constant change? Can you suggest examples to support your view?

The association of pink with femininity and blue with masculinity was made in 19th century France. In the 18th century however, a pink silk suit was regarded as appropriate attire for a gentleman. Gender should therefore not be seen as a fixed property of individuals, but rather as a part of an ongoing process where subjects are constituted, often in paradoxical ways as van  Zoonen suggests.

9) What are the five aspects van Zoonen suggests are significant in determining the influence of the media?

Van Zoonen argues that the influence of the media is dependent on:

• Whether the institution is commercial or public

• The platform upon which they operate (print versus digital media)

• Genre (drama versus news)

• Target audiences

• The place the media text holds within the audiences’ daily lives

10) What other media theorist can be linked to van Zoonen’s readings of the media?

Van Zoonen builds on Stuart Hall’s negotiated readings, arguing that the negotiated readings and subsequent focus on the way meanings are encoded and decoded.

11) Van Zoonen discusses ‘transmission models of communication’. She suggests women are oppressed by the dominant culture and therefore take in representations that do not reflect their view of the world. What other theory and idea (that we have studied recently) can this be linked to?

Transmission models of communication position women as oppressed by the dominant culture expressed in media messages. Women, then, are apparently being flooded with images that do not reflect their own selves. As such, the interaction between men and women becomes a one-way process.

12) Finally, van Zoonen has built on the work of bell hooks by exploring power and feminism. She suggests that power is not a binary male/female issue but reflects the “multiplicity of relations of subordination”. How does this link to bell hooks?

 Van Zoonen cites the experience of black feminists, such as bell hooks, where the individual can be both the  subordinate in relation (woman vs. man) and dominant in another (white woman vs. black woman). So, van Zoonen argues that the focus should be not who is ‘in power’ and who is not, but to “theorise the multiplicity of relations of subordination”