Portfolio Assignment #8

Overall this week I got a glimpse of how constructed concepts like gender and fandom operates so invariably within different spaces, and can even mean different things when dissecting it with intersectionality in mind. Within the spectrum of how we perceive fandom within different cultural and ethnic lenses, it was so interested to listen how the conflation of shipping in regards to an actor’s relationship with a character they are playing vs a fan’s more removed, in terms of power to actually bring the relationship into fruition relationship with shipping. This made me think about how varied and interpretive our relationship with digital media can be as shipping in both context took on different forms with different implications. If we look at our relationship with media from different perspectives we will inevitably glean new and interesting relationships between them.

In terms of how these topics relate to my own experience, I shortly alluded to gender within the first paragraph which made me revisit how I was perceived as a “female” gamer in an earlier part of my life. “Bitch, slut, skank, cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics” Sobieraj discusses how “women using social networking services, playing games, and participating in digital communities also find themselves on the receiving end of vitriolic, gender-based backlash.” This is how I felt exactly, boxed and stigmatizing, and this lead to embarrassment and ultimately feelings of shame, as my play was always automatically devalued based on the sole premise of my gender.

Part 2: The subsection of trolling anonymity and online abuse personally was reflective of the issues of censoring and abuse within the queer community with COVID-19. A huge resonator for me was a term, from Sarah Sobieraj’s piece, patterned resistance. A pattern of which “men resistance to women’s involvement with the public sphere”. This resistance not only spans to women but it reflective of heteronormative reactions to queer content. Although the queer community suffers high co-morbidities as a result of the interaction with HIV, lack of resources, and lower-income, media outlets are hardly covering their stories.