This talk maps out some of the many interplays between video game live streaming, gender, and sexuality.

Live streaming has become a vital area of contemporary video games and life online, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gender and sexuality are central to video game live streaming, shaping who streams, has streaming is performing, and the histories that lead up to present-day streaming practices. For example, women streamers regularly face harassment on platforms like Twitch, where the toxic masculinity of reactionary gamer cultures continues to dominate. Meanwhile, much of Twitch’s attitude toward sexuality on the platform can be understood as an attempt to disavow obvious connections between video game live streaming and webcam modeling, a form of online sex work. This talk maps out some of the many interplays between video game live streaming, gender, and sexuality, arguing that streaming should be understood as an erotic, intimate, and highly gendered form of video game play and self-presentation online.

Bo Ruberg, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Their research explores gender and sexuality in digital media and digital cultures. They are the author of The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (2020, Duke University Press) and Video Games Have Always Been Queer (2019, New York University Press) and the co-editor of Queer Game Studies (2017, University of Minnesota Press), as well as a new collection in-progress titled Live Streaming Culture.

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