Gendered Play, Racialized Reality: Black Cyberfeminism, Inclusive Communities of Practice, and the Intersections of Learning, Socialization, and Resilience in Online Gaming

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: introduction While digital games hold promise for learning and socialization, emerging research and popular debates have critiqued inclusive access to these practices and literacies. This essay examines digital games for their potential to integrate diverse individuals and communities for learning and socialization, especially in online play and broadcasting of gameplay. For example, a level of cultural competency can be attained in well-developed games to overcome essentialist notions and assumptions about women and people of color. Using Black Cyberfeminism as a theoretical lens to make sense of players’ experiences, and Racialized Pedagogical Zones (RPZs) as an analytical frame to situate digital games’ entrenched ideologies of race and racism, we contend that games offer highly unproblematized depictions but have extreme potential for cultural competency. We further utilize Communities of Practice (CoP) as a frame for understanding and interrogating equitable access to community-supported collaborative learning and mastery within game culture, more broadly, and interest-driven guilds, clans, and affinity spaces, more specifically. In our extension of CoP, we integrate inclusive to highlight the resistive and resilient strategies employed by supportive communities for diverse women in addressing the systematic nature of oppression and power relations that undergird communities of practice, particularly in marked gendered spaces such as gaming. Marginalizing practices in game culture have become more widely publicized and understood in recent years, most notably because of high profile incidents of harassment. However, representations of women and racial or ethnic minorities by the gaming industry have also been problematic historically. For instance, since the 1980s video games have been critiqued for the hypersexualization of women and women are often the victims of misogynistic [End Page 112] vitriol, as the incidents around Gamergate have exposed. People of color are featured in largely stereotypical ways and are all but absent from the gaming industry. Queer gamers and gamers with dis/abilities are almost entirely absent and, when present, are not depicted fairly. This differential treatment appears to have a symbiotic relationship with the exclusion of marginalized players. As researchers have noted, Internet technologies and virtual communities operate in a manner that benefits privileged identities. These unequal power relations are accepted as legitimate and are embedded in the cultural practices of digital technology. Nevertheless, many gamers—most notably women—have resisted this perpetual state of inequity and the dominant narrative of power, control, and exclusion. Although some in gaming contend that these are not overt practices of exclusion, many players and scholars acknowledge the existence of symbolic exclusion, where those who are valued have the privilege to define legitimate practice and participation within gaming culture. The unequal power relations operating within the gaming community influence not only what gamers consume but also what they learn about themselves and others. Further, the racialized and gendered consumptive practices through gaming are often taken for granted. Commercial gaming culture is, with few exceptions, complicit in these exclusionary practices by continuing to design at a deficit, despite these increasingly apparent realities. But many gamers have begun to resist and challenge not only the imagery but also the practices that sustain white, masculine privilege within gaming and technology in general. While these practices have yet to reach a critical mass to disrupt the power structure operating within game culture as a whole, they exist counter to the mainstream and empower the marginalized operating within them. While the literature will provide an overview of these practices, our purpose is to privilege the resistance and resilience strategies of the marginalized to disrupt the traditional narrative while they empower themselves. We utilize Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality to reflect on identity, recognizing that “the problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend difference, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences.” We also want to caution that while we focus on players who have historically been the marginalized in gaming culture and game research, we recognize that men...