Elizabeth Losh is the author of
She writes about gender and technology, the digital humanities, distance learning, connected learning, media literacy, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices.
She has written a number of frequently cited essays about communities that produce, consume, and circulate online video, videogames, digital photographs, text postings, and programming code. The diverse range of subject matter analyzed in her scholarship has included coming out videos on YouTube, videogame fan films created by immigrants, combat footage from soldiers in Iraq shot on mobile devices, video evidence created for social media sites by protesters on the Mavi Marmara, remix videos from the Arab Spring, and the use of Twitter and Facebook by Indian activists working for women’s rights after the Delhi rape case. Much of this body of work concerns the legitimation of political institutions through visual evidence, representations of war and violence in global news, and discourses about human rights. This work has appeared in edited collections from MIT Press, Routledge, University of Chicago, Minnesota, Oxford, Continuum, and many other presses.
She is Director of the Culture, Art, and Technology program at Sixth College at U.C. San Diego, where she teaches courses on digital rhetoric and new media. She is also a blogger for Digital Media and Learning Central, and a Steering Committee member of HASTAC and FemTechNet.
This is the source
When game studies became an area for scholarly inquiry in the academy, feminist
game studies soon followed. The first generation of feminist theory in game
studies built on the work of Sherry Turkle, Brenda Laurel, and Janet Murray,
although some might argue that the legacy of challenging gender norms in game
studies goes back even earlier. Now feminist game scholars organize
international conferences, edit journals and scholarly collections, and shape
trends in the profession, much as their counterparts in the digital humanities
attempt to do, but critics in feminist game studies have been able to take
advantage of what is seen as a relatively long trajectory of feminist
theoretical inquiry and field development. Articulating a need for a feminist
corrective in the digital humanities has come at a much slower pace, perhaps
because the instrumentalism of a
Feminist game studies within the digital humanities
When game studies became an area for scholarly inquiry in the academy, feminist game studies soon followed. After all, when so many videogames so obviously featured ejaculatory shooting, sexual conquest, objectified femininity, alienated labor, separation of the domestic and commercial spheres, physical domination, zero-sum negotiations, and waging mass warfare, the need for feminist responses to the aggression and opportunism represented in computer games might have seemed self-evident. The first generation of feminist theory in game studies built on the work of Sherry Turkle, Brenda Laurel, and Janet Murray, although some might argue that the legacy of challenging gender norms in game studies goes back at least to the countercultural subversion of the new games movement in the sixties and seventies or the work of the Situationists. Perhaps the correspondence between Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage about his mechanized tic-tac-toe game may point to an even long history of feminist engagement in algorithmic game culture. Now feminist game scholars organize international conferences, edit journals and scholarly collections, and shape trends in the profession, much as their counterparts in the digital humanities attempt to do, but critics in feminist game studies have been able to take advantage of what is seen as a relatively long trajectory of feminist theoretical inquiry and field development.
Articulating a need for a feminist corrective in the digital humanities has come at a
much slower pace, perhaps because the instrumentalism of a
This issue of
But where would the field of Feminist DH locate its core values? How can it be more
than simply anti-masculinist in its orientation? Criticizing the obvious fetishizing
of tools, code, competition, and massive
or big
data projects is one
thing. Doing field-building work is another. Furthermore, how would feminist DH be
specifically feminist in its theoretical grounding rather than merely oriented
toward improving access and equity for women in DH? What does it mean to rethink
rule-based systems and user agency from a feminist perspective and then apply the
worldview of feminist game studies to the work of the digital humanities? According
to Carolyn Guertin, subjectivity under feminism becomes a process and a performance that is constantly in
a state of redefining its own complexity according to a network of power
formations
(2009). What would it mean to move from a paradigm of tool
development to a paradigm of process and performance in which the network of power
formations moves from ground to figure?
Nina B. Huntemann defines feminist game studies as a field that focuses on how gender, and its intersections with
race, class, sexuality, etc., is produced, represented, consumed and practiced
in and through digital games
(2012). Huntemann, like many feminist game
scholars, is also interested in the genealogies of computer games, and their origins
in a computational media history shaped by military training, surveillance
technologies, and the exercise of force by the power of the state
Feminist approaches to videogames and virtual worlds have included a range of approaches that explicitly borrow from feminist methodologies in ethnography, human-computer interaction, science and technology studies, media arts practice, and textual criticism. It is worth noting that many of these fields are now only beginning to be referenced in the scholarly literature of the digital humanities. Many current scholars of computer games and virtual worlds – such as Beth Coleman, Mary Flanagan, Tracy Fullerton, Celia Pearce, Emily Roxworthy, and Katie Salen – also identify as designers and bring their experiences as creative professionals with prototyping, workflow management, iteration, and user-testing to the field. Even if they don’t identify as designers, many in feminist game studies identify strongly as players or power users of videogames. For example, Mia Consalvo, Lisbeth Klastrup, Bonnie Nardi, Carol Stabile, T.L. Taylor, and Jill Walker Rettberg have pursued advancement within in-game reputation systems, and their scholarly ethos as game scholars seems to be enhanced by having progressed from apprenticeship to mastery in particular games, as evidenced by their achievements, hours logged, and the fame of their avatar names.
Many debates in the digital humanities recall debates already rehearsed in game
studies. For example, significant cohorts of digital designers, programmers, and
architects must collaborate and compete with those who identify exclusively as
critics and theorists within the research community. Questions about which group can
speak with the most authority in public fora can be difficult to resolve,
particularly when plainspoken discourse and highly technical skills prized by
builders and makers are devalued by the academy. Much as DH purists have called for
more hack, less yack
or lionized
There are a number of useful insights to be gained in the digital humanities from observing how feminist game studies gained legitimacy in an environment devoted to machismo mastery and performance. Feminist game scholars have done important work on protocols, market forces, technoculture, datification, instrumentalism, opportunism, and online aggression, as well as on appropriation, domesticity, reciprocity, collective agency, community building, and empathy. They have also successfully built networks, collectives, and collaboratives. However, feminist game studies also benefited from the fact that during the past three decades feminist scholarship transformed both science and technology studies and film and television studies. Feminist scholars of literacy, programming, and cultural studies including Anne Balsamo, Wendy Chun, Radhika Gajjala, N. Katherine Hayles, and Lisa Nakamura used critical frameworks that reconfigured ideas about bodies, machines, affect, and labor and applied analytic methods formerly reserved for art and literary texts to technological discourses, such as those around reproductive medicine or computer science. At the same time, the contributions of scholars such as Mary Anne Doane, Anne Friedberg, Linda Williams, Lisa Parks, Lisa Cartwright, and Teresa de Lauretis exerted a major influence on the field of media studies by shifting the focus of critical practice from text and discourse to matters of the apparatus, technosocial environments, embodied experiences, and the interfaces and platforms of mediation.
Obviously, to take game studies seriously in the digital humanities presents a number of disciplinary, methodological, and practical problems. Game studies scholars often situate themselves as participant-observers rather than disinterested critics or archivists and reject poses of depersonalized neutrality. Game interfaces are characterized by the intentional frustration of easy user access by the game’s designers. In contrast, interfaces for digital humanities projects – search engine portals, hyperlinked pages, timelines, maps, or visualizations are supposed to be unambiguously user-friendly. Players are expected to risk failure as they solve puzzles and explore dead ends, which is a key part of game play, rather than zip through transparent navigation into the assets of core databases. In fact, the pleasure of a game play experience can often be attributed to its lack of predictability, replicability, and even stability. Furthermore, the attitudes of gamers often focus on celebrating acts of individual hacking meant to gain personal advantage rather than creating universal standards through deliberative processes dictated by professional associations. Feminist games may prove to be doubly transgressive in design. For example, in
To position oneself as a feminist can also be difficult in the context of
participating in civil discourse in digital culture. In the mid-nineties
cyberfeminist critics promised that new forms of social relations constituted by
user-generated content on distributed networks would reshape existing architectures
that defined gendered power relations, but now many who study social network sites,
computer games, and virtual worlds contend that it is difficult to mount resistance
against a neoliberal agenda promoted by the very design of infrastructures and
interfaces upon which our technologically mediated existence depends While I was writing this piece, for example, a
Canadian blogger created a game where one can punch and bruise the face of Anita
Sarkeesian, creator of the popular website
Much as feminist bloggers have been victimized by Internet harassment for taking a stand against particular forms of aggressive online conduct accepted as normative, feminist game critics might sometimes find themselves targeted for challenging the hypermasculinity of existing user behavior.
To understand the landscape of feminist game studies it may be helpful to look at the
prototypical collaboration of Ludica, a group of four feminist game scholars (Janine
Fron, Tracy Fullerton, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, and Celia Pearce) who took turns
presenting their collectively authored papers at game conferences throughout the
world. The group wrote a paper for the Digital Games Research Association that
generated considerable controversy among that research community by calling
attention to what they called the hegemony
of play
that defined the user population of computer games too narrowly
and ignored large populations of supposed 1) the production process and
environment for the creation of digital games; 2) the technologies of play,
including the evolution of games from folk traditions and cultural artifacts
to industrial products and intellectual property, and now to digital
products and virtual societies; and 3) the cultural positioning of games and
gamers
What currently constitutes the
To think about the small
data digital humanities for a moment, it might be
useful to look at the function of niche audience websites like The Library
Observatory, an open-submission Tumblr blog, where users can post screenshots of
quirks in data from the Digital Public Library of America,
such as
cataloging typos or sloppy metadata parameters, which have been made visible by The
Library Observatory’s main digital humanities visualization site operated by
Harvard’s metaLAB. Just as
Collaborative scholarship has been an important practice among intersecting groups of
feminist game scholars. For example, Ludica’s Pearce also served as a coauthor of
Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Method,
along with Tom Beollstroff, Bonnie Nardi, and T.L. Taylor. This handbook not only
emphasizes the important contributions of feminist ethnography to our understanding
of digital culture but also criticizes the instrumentalism, quantification, and
subsequent myopia of the scientific rationalism that derides subjective, personal,
or embodied perspectives. Yet collaborative authorship in the digital humanities
cannot be similarly strongly correlated with feminism. Only one of the ten authors
of the critical code studies book
Yet feminists can make distinct contributions by providing opportunities for digital
humanists to think across disciplines, particularly to consider how the literature
of the social sciences or of the digital arts can trouble the simple model of coding
knowledge promulgated by the humanities computing paradigm. After all, to visit a
digital archive as a remote user still involves accessing, browsing, reading, and
wayfinding. In particular, contemporary researchers in human-computer interaction
point to the importance of considering how embodiment or identity is experienced by
computer users who are engaged in computer mediated practices of telepresence or
ubiquity, and feminist game scholars have led in their discipline on these issues.
For example, Taylor asserts that designers should rise to the challenge presented by a
sociology of the body
In
of players who were forced to recreate their familiar 3D world in new platforms after the game was discontinued, much as participants in many digital humanities initiatives must cope with choosing between the options ofUru diaspora
feminist ethnography has long challenged boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity, individual and society, researcher and subject, fact and faction, self and other, and art and science
Although feminist game studies is still a relatively new area of inquiry, it also
benefits from opportunities to reflect on its own intellectual history. Looking back
to the work of Sherry Turkle on the shift in the mid-1980s away from hard mastery
and toward the computer is still a tool but less like a
hammer and more like a harpsichord
in Turkle’s words (63), Mimi Ito
argues that gaming is much like other domains of digital mastery in that user
behavior can’t be reduced to a conscious interventions
that foster action styles
that
offer models for other emerging practices
and sites of empowerment
to
marginalized groups (256). Of course, the promotion of feminist game studies has to
do with the agencies of peers as well as the existence of progenitors, so perhaps
this issue of DHQ will serve as an important early step in field building.