Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Events

Location

Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), Room 314
100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location

The basic narrative of the #GamerGate controversy involves feminist game developers, critics, scholars, and fans of independent gaming who have been targeted by very intense campaigns of online harassment that threaten their fundamental rights to personal privacy, bodily safety, and sexual agency. It is important for the eloquent first-person testimony of the women themselves to be given priority as speech acts that command attention as forms of resisting to prevailing misogyny, but it also may be useful to examine the larger discursive context of #GamerGate and why hard-core gamers who are fans of AAA videogames with military storylines and first-person shooter game mechanics have constructed a seemingly illogical and paranoid explanatory theory about so-called "social justice warriors" pursuing unfair advantage.?How do we understand their claims for noninterference and sovereignty in game worlds?  How do gamers' desires to preserve a "magic circle" around game play conflict with feminist notions of "safe space"?