{"title":"Why Do We Only Get Anime Girl Avatars? Collective White Heteronormative Avatar Design in Live Streams","authors":"Noel Brett","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080956","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080956","url":null,"abstract":"With live streaming rising in popularity, many people stream the creation of 3D avatars However, many of these avatars end up following a similar output: a hyper-feminized anime girl. Why is this? What are the social and technological processes constructing these avatars? To answer these questions, I propose that human (streamer and audience) and non-human (streaming platform and 3D modeling software) participants interact to produce the cultural experience of the live stream, re-producing common heteronormative, cisgendered, and racialized tropes about bodies and desirable avatars. And so, I take as my object of study the interaction that happens when all of these participants merge, forming what I call a white heteronormative assemblage. I argue that this assemblage is collective, relational, and self-reinforcing. Analyzing the relations between human and non-humans participants helps us turn our analytical lens away from media content or streamer motive, and instead toward the restrictive outcomes of such interactions.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"451 - 461"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46873128","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bilingualism and the Televisual Architecture of Linguistic (dis-) Encounters in the Israeli Television Show Arab Labor","authors":"Nahuel Ribke","doi":"10.1177/15274764221084285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221084285","url":null,"abstract":"Considered the first fully Hebrew-Arabic bilingual television show on Israeli prime time television, Arab Labor (2007–2013) attracted the attention of critics and scholars for its sharp satire and criticism of the daily dilemmas and discrimination faced by Israeli Arab citizens. Although its success among audiences and critics opened the door for other bilingual television shows spoken in Hebrew and Arabic, it also caused frustration for the series’ creator due the limits imposed by commercial television operating in an antagonistic socio-political context. While previous studies on the show have focused on its main narrative conflicts and themes, the present study proposes to examine the televisual spatio-temporal, linguistic and dramatic structures that foster the encounters and conflicts between the two languages spoken in the series.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"24 1","pages":"190 - 203"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47598916","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Cute Goddess is Actually an Aunty”: The Evasive Middle-Aged Woman Streamer and Normative Performances of Femininity in Video Game Streaming","authors":"Maria Ruotsalainen","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080962","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper the focus is on the representations of “middle-aged” or “aging” women streamers in western media. I analyze discussions in Western online media around a case of Chinese DouYu live-streamer. “Qiaobiluo Dianxia,” as her streamer name goes, became a topic in Western media after a glitch in her live stream revealed her to be a middle-aged woman, rather than young woman she was assumed to be. The discussions are analyzed with critical discourse analysis. It is argued that the aging bodies of women, both their presence and absence, should be read and understood through toxic gaming culture and geek masculinity and the hegemonic discourse they constitute.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"487 - 497"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44736941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Labor of (Queer) Love: Maintaining “Cozy Wholesomeness” on Twitch During COVID-19 and Beyond","authors":"Jordan Youngblood","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080966","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the idea of “cozy wholesomeness” in streaming on the Twitch platform through the example of an LGBTQ+ content creator, her partner, and her development of an ongoing domestic space which welcomed queer audiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on a span of streams from November 2020 to January 2021, the article first seeks to define cozy wholesomeness as a streaming process that combines choice of game, style of streaming, and audience interest to form an experience driven by intimacy, sincerity, and active resistance to alt-right mentalities even as the concept itself potentially becomes a product or marketing hook. For this particular streamer, producing a supportive, active chat community driven by cozy wholesomeness inevitably collides with sustaining streaming as a profitable venture—a process compounded by Twitch’s own interest in commoditizing queer content as a way of displaying its own apparent diversity.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"531 - 541"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49058043","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Not to Be Seen: Notes on the Gendered Intimacy of Livestreaming the Covid-19 Pandemic","authors":"Daniel Lark","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080917","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080917","url":null,"abstract":"Livestreaming during the Covid-19 pandemic has become a staging ground for a kind of virtual socialization that favors gendered and middle class norms of intimacy, affective labor, and domesticity, despite a grave lack of material support for the transition to online learning and working from home. In this paper, I focus on key images and discussions circulating in the press and on social media around the performance and construction of the livestreaming space in relation to virtual learning and remote work among white collar professionals. Livestreaming reshapes domestic life and space through its ability to blur the boundary between home and work and the nascent norms and practices of livestreaming borrow from existing streaming subcultures such as video game streaming on platforms like Twitch.tv. The intimacy of livestreaming, however, is a double-edged sword as it exposes livestreaming’s inability to curtail the worst effects of the pandemic and the disproportionate impact of this vast social rearrangement on women. Livestreaming is easily integrated into existing regimes of control and is the subject of an intense public debate about its politics this very reason.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"462 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47806133","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Routinization of Media Events: Televised Sports in the Era of Mega-TV","authors":"Ilan Tamir, S. Lehman-Wilzig","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080989","url":null,"abstract":"Media events theory, developed by Katz and Dayan in the 1990s, has become one of the most well-known and cited theories in communications research, well-aligned with television’s central role in social life at the time. However, three decades since, in which events have spilled over to other media spaces thereby reshaping the theory’s underlying concept, sports broadcasts have remained a consistently stable source of media events. Although the original theory addressed media events as a rare phenomenon of a distinct, well-defined nature, the current study describes sports events that globally now constitute a sequence of routine mega media events that effectively function as a key anchor in traditional television programing. In the era of multiple screens, content abundance, and flexible viewing times, media events have become classic linear television’s programing core—instrumental in retaining its viewer base and in exploiting television’s advantage over rival screens and content. As a result, sport has become television’s main resource, thus indicating a need to revise elements of media theory. This study suggests several revision possibilities and what they entail methodologically for researchers.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"24 1","pages":"106 - 120"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44069116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Just on the Right Side of Wrong: (De)Legitimizing Feminism in Video Game Live Streaming","authors":"Amanda L. L. Cullen","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080937","url":null,"abstract":"The participation of women in video games continues to be interrogated, especially the participation of women who are, or are perceived to be, feminists. A considerable portion of the discourse on the appropriateness of feminism in live streaming takes place on Twitch and gaming subreddits. This paper applies a qualitative analysis to several Reddit threads that address the subject of feminism in live streaming. The analysis of subreddit comments about feminism in streaming suggest that many Twitch users believe feminism is an ideology that is incompatible with video games and live streaming. Furthermore, many of these users believe that feminists actively harm live streaming communities. This paper presents an understanding of how and why the presence and legitimacy of feminism in games continues to be contested and demonstrates what is at stake for feminists who desire to participate in building a future for themselves in video game live streaming.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"542 - 552"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45924127","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beauty From the Waist Up: Twitch Drag, Digital Labor, and Queer Mediated Liveness","authors":"Christopher J. Persaud, M. Perks","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080912","url":null,"abstract":"Game live streaming scholarship has explored how the medium offers diverse forms of self-presentation, increasingly commercialized avenues of promotion, and vivid examples of participatory cultural production. This article focuses on the vibrant Twitch.tv subculture of drag artist game live streamers (or drag streamers) who engage in digital labor and performance, offer a distinct case of queer internet microcelebrity, and highlight tensions concerning the representation of queer identities in the social media age. As more queer people begin developing branded social media selves in spaces of real-time performance, such as the increasing number of drag streamers on Twitch, we contend that their performance of queerness becomes tied up in both potential avenues for monetization and the expectations of their followers. We conclude by developing the concept of “queer mediated liveness” to describe the labor, esthetics, and live content creation of queer streamers.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"475 - 486"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44360527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Desiring Wanghuang: Live Streaming, Porn Consumption and Acts of Citizenship among Gay Men in Digital China","authors":"Linn Song","doi":"10.1177/15274764221080914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221080914","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates Chinese gay men’s consumption of domestic pornography on international social network platforms following the country’s anti-porn campaigns targeting live streaming. Set against the backdrop of China’s illiberal digital landscape characterized by rapid platformization and evolving Internet governance, the paper draws on in-depth interviews with twenty-one Chinese young gay men to explore how they take advantage of digital platforms and algorithms to creatively and resiliently carve out a space for expressing same-sex desires in a precarious environment. It argues that, although these creative acts of sexual citizenship empower gay men in self-understanding and community-building, they are also critically limited by China’s intertwining neoliberal and illiberal cultures.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"498 - 508"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48569541","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Love You, Bro”: Performing Homosocial Intimacies on Twitch","authors":"Tom Welch","doi":"10.1177/15274764221081460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764221081460","url":null,"abstract":"This article will consider the affective labor of male professional game streamers on Twitch in their role as performers and as community managers for their audiences. It asks what changes when we frame the discussion of male streaming labor around affect, and what is gained from thinking about streaming labor as a product and producer of norms and desires. Though a growing number of scholars have considered the roles of labor generally and affective labor in particular on Twitch, less attention has been spent on the particular role of masculinity in a space where the majority of streamers and viewers are male. This paper argues that male Twitch streamers ought to be understood as performing an inherently intimate and affective relational labor that produces and is produced by homosocial desire and the reification of geek masculinity, in addition to the affective labor of performance.","PeriodicalId":51551,"journal":{"name":"Television & New Media","volume":"23 1","pages":"521 - 530"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2022-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41681626","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}