Lady Game Club: The Popular Feminist Politics of Women-in-Games Organizations

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dc.contributor.advisorCoulter, Natalie
dc.contributor.authorFisher, Stephanie Judith
dc.date.accessioned2024-11-07T11:16:32Z
dc.date.available2024-11-07T11:16:32Z
dc.date.copyright2024-09-16
dc.date.issued2024-11-07
dc.date.updated2024-11-07T11:16:31Z
dc.degree.disciplineEducation
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstract‘Feminism in games’ is a large, dispersed, and networked movement that is happening in online and offline spaces. This research seeks to illuminate how inequities can be reproduced within a feminist community through a close examination of Lady Game Club (LGC), a non-profit organization that teaches women how to make digital games. Drawing on the feminist theories of ‘platform feminism’ (Singh, 2021) and ‘popular feminism’ (Banet-Weiser, 2018), I theorize LGC as a platform for popular feminism in games. This study employs community-engaged ethnographic methods, specifically participant-observation and interviews, to analyse the feminist logics that are built into the structure of LGC and practiced by the women game-makers who are a part of this community. By examining the feminist politics of LGC, this study demonstrates the limits of popular feminism in creating an inclusive and equitable games industry and challenging systems of oppression. LGC takes a direct representation approach to feminist activism. It is designed to get more (white and middle-class) women into the games industry, but not to change it. As a platform, LGC elevates and amplifies popular feminism’s normative modes of feminist resistance (i.e., ‘women’s individual empowerment’) while obscuring other forms of feminist resistance, such and those based in survival, care, and refusal. The organization structures feminist politics as an individual politics rather than a collective one, foreclosing the possibility for feminist resistances that are based on collective action or thinking about oppression as systemic or 'built in' (Benjamin, 2019). Although LGC is enmeshed in and reinforces the hegemonic systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy, it also creates an opening in the public’s imagination for a more equitable game industry.
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/42499
dc.languageen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectWomen's studies
dc.subject.keywordsFeminist media theory
dc.subject.keywordsPopular feminism
dc.subject.keywordsWomen
dc.subject.keywordsVideo games
dc.subject.keywordsEthnography
dc.subject.keywordsEmbedded researcher
dc.titleLady Game Club: The Popular Feminist Politics of Women-in-Games Organizations
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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