New Materialist Analyses of Virtual Gaming,Distributed Violence,and Relational Aggression

Abstract

Concerns about children’s and teenager’s use of computer games and their access to films with a high level of violence, coupled with concerns about the possible transfer of aggression from media to children are widespread. However, the question is whether aggression among children and youth necessarily stems from one clear point of origin. This article uses Karen Barad’s agential realist conceptualizations of intra-active enactment of material-discursive phenomena together with Judith Butler’s poststructuralist conceptualizations to look at a study focused on this issue. Thinking with these theories and interviews with two boys aged 9 and 11 about their everyday lives in and outside of schools, I investigate where violence and aggression move in children’s everyday lives, how flows of violence and aggression intra-act, and what feeds into them. I further discuss which kinds of aggression become objects of adult concern and which remain out of focus. In these analyses, I argue that new materialist theory is especially helpful in thinking about the many intra-acting forces in the enactment of children’s and youth’s lives and that analytical attention to the intra-action of virtual aggression as part of a comprehensive apparatus of production brings complexity to the analyses and produces new, surprising, and more useful knowledge about this issue.