Nerd/Geek Masculinity: Technocracy, Rationality, and Gender in Nerd Culture's Countermasculine Hegemony (original) (raw)
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Nerd and geek culture have become subjects of increasing public concern in recent years, with growing visibility and power for technical professions and increasing relevance of video games, science fiction, and fantasy in popular culture. As a subculture, nerd/geek culture tends to be described in terms of the experiences of men and boys who are unpopular because of their niche interests or lack of social skills. This dissertation proposes the concept of nerd/geek masculinity to understand discourses of hegemonic masculinity in nerd/geek culture. Examining three case studies, the novel Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, the neoreactionary political ideology, and the #GamerGate controversy, the dissertation suggests that nerd/geek masculinity responds to a perceived emasculation of men who identify as nerds or geeks by constructing the interests, skills, and behaviors of nerd/geek culture as inherently male traits. In this way, nerd/geek masculinity turns the very traits nerds and geeks are often mocked for into evidence of manhood – as the cost of excluding women and queer people from nerd and geek culture.
Revenge of the Nerds: Recidivist Masculinity, Identity Politics and the Online ‘Culture Wars’
Journal of Extreme Anthropology, 2017
This paper is longform commentary and analysis of Angela Nagle's recent work Kill All Normies Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right. It explores the work's relevance to 'Extreme Masculinties', and places it within the context of the contemporary poltiical situation. The work's main thesis on the aesthetic and libidinal forms and characteristics of the 'Alt-Right' are heavily interrogated and placed within the historical context of previous 'crises' in masculinity. This analysis proceeds to further explore the existence of this contemporary crisis through the broader spectrum of identity politics, and its problematic ideological conflicts and consequences.
It’s A Man’s World: Misogyny and Geekdom
Long gone are the days of video games being a 'male' activity. The common trope of the pasty white geek living in his parent's basement playing Space Invaders has been replaced with an entire subculture within the video game world: women as players. According to the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), women now make up 47% of video game players and constitute a larger group than the traditional target demographic of males under the age of 17 (ESA, 2012, 3). Unfortunately the memo hasn't quite reached as far as the designers and producers who still cater to the male market, nor to the male players who engage in sometimesviolent misogyny against female gamers.
This paper is longform commentary and analysis of Angela Nagle's recent work 'Kill All Normies Online culture wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the alt-right'. It explores the work's relevance to 'Extreme Masculinties', and places it within the context of the contemporary political situation. The work's main thesis on the aesthetic and libidinal forms and characteristics of the 'Alt-Right' are heavily interrogated and placed within the historical context of previous 'crises' in masculinity. This analysis proceeds to further explore the existence of this contemporary crisis through the broader spectrum of identity politics, and its problematic ideological conflicts and consequences. This article appears in the journal of Extreme Anthropology, published by the University of Oslo, and is reproduced here through Creative Commons: https://www.journals.uio.no/index.php/JEA/article/view/5359
Shut Up and Play, or Get Out: A Pedagogy of Gendered Digital Identities in Video Gaming
2018
To my parents, with love, to Kurtis, for being Player Two, or fighting for Play One, and to Hali for teaching me to catch baby Mario. Awad: This is still all your fault. You are a mentor and a friend. Thank you for throwing me in the deep end and praying I could swim. Also, thank you for finally teaching me to tab indent. Tim Stanley, thank you for serving as a second advisor and going above and beyond the call of duty. I thank you for fielding my phone calls and defusing my worries, and supporting my whole person, not just the academic. I also thank you for laughing when I called you a troll, and when I turned you into an avatar. As for my committee, THANK YOU for your support during the final reviews of this dissertation. Megan, Michelle and Francis, your contributions and support in helping me finish this dissertation have been so important to me. To my support network: Jessica and Sierra, long enduring friends who saw me through it all, thank you. To the Flora House gang, thank you for your love and distractions. Kat and Marc, all your texts, phone calls, and emails helped a lot. Even when I didn't answer them. Emily and Adam, thanks for all the times you let me set various copies of this work on fire. It will always be appreciated.
What nerdcore porn has to tell us about toxic masculinity in gamer cultures
The great majority of the existing work that examines digital games and pornography focuses on the portrayal of women and sex acts in digital games. However, work has also emerged that marks the parallels between the two due to the embodied and affective manner in which they are experienced. This article examines the emergence of nerdcore pornography, a moniker developed and applied by the destructoid (www.destructoid.com) online community to describe a developing genre of photography that portrays nude subjects with digital game technology. These photographs are primarily of women and are often overtly sexualized. This article examines a corpus of 74 nerdcore porn images from the original destructoid post from July 2006, using a visual analysis of the photographs to map key affective themes in the genre and how they resonate affectively within the heteronormative male gaming subculture for whom they are curated. Visual analysis locates two key themes, domesticity and nostalgia, that are themselves interwoven with the more explicitly carnal depiction of female sexuality and nudity. This means that while nerdcore porn does objectify women and sexualize women gamers it also offers insight into other connected issues in gaming subcultures that demonstrates how digital gaming and gaming cultures are sites where particular toxic versions heterosexual masculinity identities are constructed.
Militant meninism: the militaristic discourse of Gamergate and Men’s Rights Activism
Media, Culture & Society, 2020
The connection between military metaphor and feminism – specifically radical and ‘militant feminism’ – has been well established by theorists. However, the same cannot be said for the analogous connection between militaristic discourse and Men’s Rights Activism (MRA). MRAs have often posited themselves in opposition to feminism and frequently portray the two as being on opposite sides of a ‘culture war’. This was particularly apparent during the Gamergate movement, which became intrinsically tied to MRA. The Gamergate movement was the subject of heavy media scrutiny, due to its highly publicised and vitriolic attacks on women. This article looks at chatlogs leaked from one of Gamergate’s main chatrooms, which exposed Gamergate’s rhetorical strategies. Having analysed the dialogue, the article argues that Gamergaters have adopted a militaristic discourse. This is evidenced by their consistent use of militaristic terminology, and the treatment of their actions as being military ‘operations’ within a larger war against feminism.
Fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins lays out a blueprint for participatory culture that highlights its potential for more democratic, more inclusive mediascapes, asserting that corporate media producers have an economic incentive to listen to the suggestions and demands made by its fans. This article questions who is able to lay claim to titles like 'fan' or 'gamer', how those titles are being contested along gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed lines, what happens when new groups lay claim to those titles, and how some fans are reacting to the loss of their privileged relationships with content producers. I look at fan responses to North American game developer BioWare's decision to diversify games like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Dragon Age II by adding the option to play as a gay male character. I discovered that what was often framed by fans as a desire to prevent politics from leaking into gaming and ruining its unique attractions manifested as the maintenance of a heterocentric construction of the gamer identity.
Technoqueer: Re/Con/Figuring Posthuman Narratives
2012
This dissertation addresses the intersections of queer and technology to rethink the posthuman as raced, gendered, and queered as co-constituted through and by technology. Given technoculture's appropriation of queerness as yet another identity category subject to individualist manipulation and the near invisibility or silence of technology in queer theory, this dissertation theorizes the "technoqueer," building on the pioneering work of Donna Haraway's cyborg, Roseanne Allucquere Stone definition of the technosocial subject, Nina Wakeford's cyberqueer, Lisa Nakamura's cybertype, and N. Katherine Hayles on the posthuman. This project looks at cyberspace and bodyhacking technologies-real or imagined-to show how technology is never neutral or simply a tool. On the one hand, the metaphor of cyberspace and the reality of online "synthetic worlds" rely on ideologies of configurable identities, disembodiment, and freedom of exploration and expression. On the other hand, bodyhacking or the ability to shape, manipulate, enhance, and transform the body offers similar promises of escaping biological destiny, of self-improvement and selffashioning, and possessive individuality. Given the popular narratives of technologies like the Internet, bionics, and gamification as liberating humanity from the prison of the "meat," v this dissertation deploys a comparative study of literature, video games, and body modification technologies in order to articulate alternative readings of technologicallymediated race, gender, and sexuality foreclosed or overlooked by contemporary posthumanism. Looking to figures like Alan Turing or the Bionic Woman and looking at texts like William Gibson's Neuromancer, George Schuyler's Black No More, Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Irrational Games's Bioshock, and Zynga's Facebook game Frontierville, this project demonstrates the ways technology is imbricated with race, gender, and sexuality and how liberation from one set of embodiments or identities often means the stabilization or policing of others. The technoqueer then reveals and challenges the structures of the near ubiquity of technological mediation and penetration into twenty-first century life-the technonormative matrix-in order to theorize alternative futurities and embrace technoqueer ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Thomas Foster, who gave me the right chemistry of guidance and freedom to help me find my voice and perspectives as a scholar and writer. I would like to thank my other committee members Kate Cummings and Eva Cherniavsky for their invaluable questions, advice, and insight. I would also like to thank the Department of English at the University of Washington for their support and belief in me, in particular Gary Handwerk, Brian Reed, and Kathy Mork. Moreover, thanks to the Department of Comparative History of Ideas and Phillip Thurtle for the opportunities to grow my scholarship and pedagogy. I would like to thank Kathleen Woodward and the Simpson Center for the Humanities for their sponsorship of my academic and professional pursuits. Thanks are due as well to the Department of English at the University of Maryland who started me on this heroic journey, specifically Michael Olmert, Jack Russell, Kandice Chuh, Verlyn Flieger, Linda Coleman, Marilee Lindemann, and Theresa DiPaolo. Finally and most importantly, thank you to my family, my partner, Greg, and my friends for their continued love, understanding, conviviality, and support. Special thanks to Tim Welsh, Jane Lee, grad pub at the College Inn, the Critical Gaming Project, the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate interest group, my Tellings table past and present, and Archaea here and there. Again, thanks to all, without which none of this would have been possible.
Welcome to my fantasy: Queer desires and digital utopias
Bulletin / Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien / Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (ISSN: 0947-6822), 2023
Throughout the last two decades, the fandom of Final Fantasy VII has discussed whether the infamous cross-dressing quest is homophobic or not, and how to adapt it for a possible remake. Queer and video game scholars, however, have not engaged in the discussion surrounding the cross-dressing protagonist Cloud Strife. In this essay, I intend to fill this gap and argue that the remake fails to redeem the complicated legacy of Final Fantasy VII in terms of LGBT representation. The game, I argue, shifted from modes and techniques of heteronormativity to homonormative power in this process. Through the lens of queer game studies, this paper analyzes interviews conducted with YouTube gamers from the US. In conclusion, I argue that the remake is less an emancipatory representation than a tool of a broader civilizing liberal project that deradicalizes queer action by commodifying it in the video game industry. The text shows that the game, though it tolerates and includes queer characters within the world of Final Fantasy, ultimately enacts a particular notion of tolerance with normative and normalizing implications that exclude marginalized queers who do not fit the homonormative status quo.