Gendering Identity Talk: Gamers’ Gendered Constructions of Gamer Identity

ABSTRACT Despite comprising roughly half of the gaming population and engaging in similar activities, women remain marginalized in gaming spaces. Previous scholarship has shown how cultural and subcultural gender conventions can serve to reproduce gender inequality in a range of social contexts. This article examines how video gamers used identity talk to gender themselves through the telling of self-narratives. Players represented themselves as gendered through narratives of play, framing similar gaming behaviors as either masculine or feminine. This retelling of gaming practices was rooted in larger, cultural meanings of gender, and in repackaging their gaming in gender-congruent manners, gamers reproduced gender within gaming spaces. Ultimately, this research presents how gamers maintained gaming as a social space dominated by men through their reproduction of a gender order that valued men’s play and minimized women’s play.