This thesis will linguistically categorise the harassment which female gamers receive on Xbox Liv... more This thesis will linguistically categorise the harassment which female gamers receive on Xbox Live. In an innovative, multimodal approach, both the lexis and the discourse within text and voice messages, and asynchronous and synchronous environments, will be critically analysed to demonstrate how women are viewed as intruders within a system that promotes hegemonic masculinity as its norm. In order to combat what is perceived as a collective identity threat, male gamers use extreme verbal and sexual harassment to attempt to position the female gamer as ‘Other’, thus delegitimising her presence in the online sphere. In order to do this, identities are forced on the women who participate in online gaming – they are delegitimised through derogatory names vilifying their opinions, body, sexuality in relations to hypermasculine ideals; they are also dehumanised, objectified, and discursively silenced. Due to the fast-paced and aggressive nature of FPS (first person shooter) games, hypermasculinity positions itself as the norm and punishes those who transgress or do not conform to these hegemonic ideologies. From a theoretical perspective, I utilise a blended paradigm drawing a feminist critical discourse and stylistic analysis of the types and severity of insults used, augmented by Culpeper’s theories of impoliteness, identity theories of positioning and demonstrations of the importance of language as an ideological tool for the construction of identity.
This thesis will linguistically categorise the harassment which female gamers receive on Xbox Liv... more This thesis will linguistically categorise the harassment which female gamers receive on Xbox Live. In an innovative, multimodal approach, both the lexis and the discourse within text and voice messages, and asynchronous and synchronous environments, will be critically analysed to demonstrate how women are viewed as intruders within a system that promotes hegemonic masculinity as its norm. In order to combat what is perceived as a collective identity threat, male gamers use extreme verbal and sexual harassment to attempt to position the female gamer as ‘Other’, thus delegitimising her presence in the online sphere. In order to do this, identities are forced on the women who participate in online gaming – they are delegitimised through derogatory names vilifying their opinions, body, sexuality in relations to hypermasculine ideals; they are also dehumanised, objectified, and discursively silenced. Due to the fast-paced and aggressive nature of FPS (first person shooter) games, hypermasculinity positions itself as the norm and punishes those who transgress or do not conform to these hegemonic ideologies. From a theoretical perspective, I utilise a blended paradigm drawing a feminist critical discourse and stylistic analysis of the types and severity of insults used, augmented by Culpeper’s theories of impoliteness, identity theories of positioning and demonstrations of the importance of language as an ideological tool for the construction of identity.
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Papers by Siobhan Ramos