Theories

The third feminist wave is more heterogeneous and inclusive, with factors of discrimination such as sexual orientation, ethnicity and social class being taken into account. With this third wave also comes the idea that gender, like sex, is the result of social constructions: gender precedes sex and constructs it (Butler, 1990).  According to Butler, gender is a set of social norms that individuals repeatedly perform until these norms come to be confused with biological traits.

 

When the term 'women' is used, it is not to refer to individuals who correspond to the feminine pole of the gender binary and whose sexuality, social role is constructed according to the Western feminine model. Rather, we use the term 'women' in the belief that gender is a continuum and not a binary system based on hierarchical social relations between the feminine and the masculine. A little later, a third wave of videogame feminism was born, encouraging a diversification of videogame representations and demanding more diversity of people within the game industry, but also within male and female gamers in order to make videogame culture more inclusive (until now, most characters and creators have been male, Caucasian and heterosexual).

While video game representations have mostly been designed from the binary gender scheme, resulting in female characters being in passive roles and male characters in active roles. (Huntemann, 2010).

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The term 'gender relations' used in this research is based on the idea that the gender to which we belong affects all aspects of our lives and regulates all our social relationship.

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Furthermore, if we look at the term stigma, we notice that etymologically it comes from the ancient Greek word stigma meaning "red hot mark", referring to a Greco-Roman practice that consisted of physically marking individuals on the margins of society in order to differentiate between those considered "respectable" and those considered unsuitable (murderers, slaves, thieves, prostitutes, etc.). Those who were branded had their humanity questioned and were marginalised. Even today, certain stigmas are likely to differentiate those who are socially accepted from those who are not (Goffman, 1975). In video games women, following this example of stigmatisation, are categorised according to their gender. Thus by the fact that a woman should not play video games or the sexual character that might arise from a female player giving way to a continued marginalisation in video games.

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Stigma, according to Goffman, is the result of an expectation of an individual, in this case a female gamer, based on a stereotype: "Relying on these expectations, we then transform them into normative expectations, into rightly presented demands" (1975, p. 12). Stigma thus arises when there is a gap between our virtual (assumed, potential) social identity and our actual social identity (Goffman, 1975, p. 12). Furthermore, Goffman distinguishes between the discredited (visible stigma) and the discreditable (whose stigmatisation is in potential and occurs only after interaction and detection of the 'anomaly' in an individual). While for a long time, the attributes associated with femininity were, with a few exceptions, visible and discredited stigmas, the advent of online gaming has made femininity discreditable, as the female identity of the players is not always visible from the beginning of the game. In his article "The Ritualisation of Femininity" (1977), Goffman discusses the supposed criteria of femininity emphasised in advertisements, which have the effect of distorting our conceptions of what a woman is. He establishes different categories corresponding to the various ideas that these advertisements convey: the childlike, docile woman, submissive, etc.

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These categories are reminiscent of certain stereotypes that can also be found in video game video game culture (see blog and twitter images). It is important to emphasise that these supposed criteria of femininity refer to the behaviour that women are supposed to follow and the roles that they are supposed to adopt, that it is also because of these attributes that they are stigmatised as a category. In response to all these data, men play a very specific role in the stigmatisation and marginalisation of women in video games through different types of masculinity, including the one I will address in my research linked to rituals, that of complicity masculinity. It concerns men who, despite the fact that they do not conform to the criteria of hegemonic masculinity, consciously or unconsciously promote and disseminate it, while trying to conform to it in order to gain certain privileges (Connell, 2005, p. 832).

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I would also like to look at sexual harassment in video games, which can be seen as a ritual in the realm of masculinity. Sexual harassment is legally defined by three criteria: 1) unwanted sexual behaviour, 2) which occurs repeatedly, and 3) which has an adverse effect on the victim. Sexual harassment is a phenomenon that perpetuates rape culture in society and in online video games. The video game culture is marked by a rape culture that normalises behaviour.

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This is evidenced by the threats of rape or assault that many female gamers have received on Twitter and blogs, as well as through testimonials in interviews. Similarly, Jenson and De Castell's Girls@play study (2011) shows that female gamers who have internalized the idea that girls are less good at video games than boys perform less well in a male-dominated environment.

 

The feeling of stigmatization or judgment thus seems likely to alter the female gamer's level of play.