“Dress up! … and what else?: Young girls ‘online social gaming and the negotiation of gender identities

Pasquali, F., Mascheroni G. (2012). “Dress up! … and what else?: Young girls ‘online social gaming and the negotiation of gender identities. ECREA 2012, Gender section -Istanbul 24-27 Oct. 2012.

Abstract: The paper investigates young girls’ online gaming sites and Facebook and mobile gaming apps under the perspective of gender social construction and negotiation. Usually focused on fashion (catwalks, ‘doll-maker’ sites and services, hairstylists and beauty saloons, etc.), house keeping and romance, these games offer highly standardized patterns of gender identity focused on male/female stereotypes derived by traditional gendered discourses, media representations (Jacobson, 2005; Nayak & Kehily, 2008) and celebrity cultures. Thanks to their simulative nature of games, they are extremely effective in socializing kids to consumer culture and engaging them in practices of consumption that are both normative and creative, constraining and personalised. At the same time, game-based activities represent the second step, after school-related work, in the take up of online practices (Livingstone et al. 2011; Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt et al. 2012), thus playing a central role in peer learning and literacy building (Schott and Kambouri, 2006). Under this perspective thus these game are very important in socializing young girls to a media and communication ecology, which sustains the increasing importance of peer networks and online communities in the process of producing, negotiating and representing identities. This tension between highly stereotyped sex roles and the emancipatory function of socializing young girls to ICTs and digital culture makes these games an interesting case study, and allows to analyze the social construction of gender and young girls’ gendered performances. The proposed paper is rooted in the literature devoted to the analysis of the important changes involving childhood in contemporary media and consumer cultures (e.g. Livingstone, 2009; Buckingham, 2011), and the literature addressing the relation between gaming and gender (e.g. Cassell and Jenkins, 1998; Taylor, 2003; Carr, 2006; Thornham, 2008). Under these premises, the paper has three aims: 1) it aims to identify the gender female/male stereotypes at play in these online gaming sites and applications; 2) it aims to understand the role of these games in shaping young girls’ gender identities, investigating for instance whether and how these socially normative representations of femininity are appropriated, negotiated and/or resisted by younger girls; 3) it aims to understand how these games contribute to promoting young girls’ media literacy, and to socializing them to contemporary consumer culture. The paper combines an analysis of online gaming sites and gaming apps with group interviews with young girls aged 10-13.