Act Like a Woman,Play Like a Man: Manhood Acts and the Gendered and Racialized Organization of Online Professional Streamers

Abstract

Professional gaming is a billion-dollar industry with some earning incomes comparable to those of popular athletes and entertainers. The rapid rise of professional gaming owes its success to the advent of Twitch.tv, a video streaming platform that enables streamers to broadcast a live feed of their gameplay while interacting with fans. While white men have mostly dominated this arena, white women and people of color are beginning to rise in the ranks of professional streaming. In this article, we examine how online platforms like Twitch represent a new type of workplace that is organized around geek masculinity and manhood acts, establishing and perpetuating hierarchies of masculine dominance and white privilege. Analyzing interaction patterns of streamers and their viewers via publicly available text and video data, we find that men streamers and their audiences create a hostile work environment for white women and people of color online in three ways. First, gendered communication patterns of streamers uphold the gender hierarchy. Second, communication patterns of the audience rely on racialized manhood acts that put women in their “place” and perpetuate white supremacy through racialized stereotypes. Finally, manhood acts based on sexual harassment towards women, including racial epithets, signal male dominance and the dominance of white culture. These virtual manhood acts perpetuate an organizational structure of sexism and racism that establishes a hierarchical workplace, placing white men “geeks” at the top and reinforcing gender and racial inequalities in the workplace.