Producing alternative gender orders: a critical look at girls and gaming

ABSTRACT This article examine some of the ways in which girls are discursively set up as subordinate in relation to boys and men by and within the digital games industry and culture at large, and how they push back on these imposed subjects positions when engaging in media production (game development) under both regular and inverse conditions. Expanding on our previous research on gender and game play, this project explores how the hegemonic discourses of female participation in games culture are taken up by girls who want to make their own digital games. We employ a poststructural understanding of gender and power as fluid and produced through and within social relations to demonstrate how participants are not helpless victims of subjection. Rather, these girls are active in the construction of their own subjectivities, leveraging different aspects of their identity and/or exercising an institutionally sanctioned (albeit temporary) autonomy to resist discursive positioning.