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Document Type

Article

Abstract

This paper uses data taken from chat logs within a first person shooter game, Quake Online, in order to explore the performance of gender online. Previous research has shown how physicality is given a position of importance in institutions where masculinity is developed and reproduced such as sports and war; cyberspace offers the opportunity of divorcing the performance of masculinity from the body. Researchers of gender in cyberspace are divided into two perspectives about the effect of the absence of a physical body on the performance of gender: One camp believes that without the constraints of the body, gender in cyberspace becomes fluid (evidenced in the work of Sherry Turkle, Sandy Stone and Cleo Odzer) while the other believes that gender is reproduced mimetically in cyberspace. This chapter examines the chatting in an online gaming site and provides evidence that the performance of masculinity in a bodiless realm reproduces gender roles rather than transcending them. In fact, the reproduction of masculinity online as aggressive, violent, misogynist and homophobic may be more stereotypical and rigid than in "real life." Discourse in the chat logs of an online interactive gaming site demonstrates an overt show of masculinity through language. The chat function of the game is utilized in order to both dramatize superiority as well as manage defeat. Exaggerating wins and justifying losses most frequently take the forms of using sexuality as a threat both by homophobic and homoerotic references and using excessive violence. As such, this paper furthers the discussion of gender online, raising important questions about the limitations of our imaginations.

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