Streaming out of the spiral of silence. Women’s visibility in gaming community and on Twitch

Women’s entrance into male-dominated spaces has always been a contentious process, fraught with conflicts surrounding the legitimacy of their participation. This paper aims to offer an account of those conflicts in the field of gaming and geek culture through the lens of the spiral of silence theory. In light of this frame, we can see the history of women’s presence in this social field as composed of four phases. In Phase 1 (1980-2010), gaming was established as a masculine space, where women could gain conditional acceptance only as long as they refrained from voicing issues related to their identities and experiences. In Phase 2, the spiral of silence started to be broken during the wave of “geek feminism” of the early 2010s, when online communities gave voice and visibility to women participating in the culture. In Phase 3, misogynistic backlash erupted in the form of #GamerGate (2014), a campaign of harassment that portrayed gaming culture as under threat from feminists and “social justice warriors”. Today, we are living through Phase 4, where the conflicts around women’s presence have found a new battleground on Twitch.tv, which we explored through interviews with gaming streamers and netnographic observation of their channels. Our aim is to bring into relief how the cultural codes inherited from geek culture and the affordances of the platform coalesce to create an often-hostile environment for women, who must perform different forms of emotion management in order to establish themselves as legitimate actors against sexist expectations.