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Arts, Media and Popular Culture

Collective Organizing, Individual Resistance, or Asshole Griefers? An Ethnographic Analysis of Women of Color In Xbox Live

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We are steadily witnessing the appropriation of new communication technologies to facilitate collective organizing and mobilization. As Eltantawy and Wiest (2011) explain, the development of social media creates opportunities for digital and web based social movements to change the reality of collective action. Cyberactivists have incorporated a host of tools to facilitate their organizational activities from staging boycotts, staging public protests to planning demonstrations (Langman 2005). The types of new communication technologies that have been used include short messaging services (SMS), social networking sites, and as the current research will examine, virtual gaming communities. Typically, one would not assume that collective organizing and resistance would take place in a virtual gaming community. But this is exactly where a cohort of female gamers experience and resist hegemonic inequality every day. This paper explores their community within Xbox Live [1] and documents their struggles with racism, sexism, heterosexism, and other intersecting oppressions experienced at the hand (voice) of other gamers. They have responded with various in-game tactics to counter the perceived source of their (linguistic) oppression, the default gamer.

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: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.,
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