Consumption and gender: a late-Wittgensteinian view

1. Consumption and gender: a late-Wittgensteinian view Jo Helle-Valle SIFO

2. Work done and in the making • Helle-Valle, Jo & Dag Slettemeås. 2008. ICTs, domestication and language-games: a Wittgensteinian approach to media uses. New Media & Society, 10(1): 45-66. • Helle-Valle, Jo & Ardis Storm-Mathisen. 2008. “Playing computer games in the family context.” Human IT – journal for information, technology studies as a human science. 9(3): 62–82. (http://etjanst.hb.se/bhs/ith/3-9/index.htm). • Storm-Mathisen, Ardis og Jo Helle-Valle. 2008. “Media, identity and methodology: reflections on practice and discourse”, pp. 55-73. In I. Rydin and U. Sjöberg (eds.) Mediated crossroads: identity, youth culture and ethnicity - Theoretical and methodological challenges, Halmstad: Nordicom. • Helle-Valle, Jo. 2009 or 2010. “Language-games, in/dividuals and media uses: what a practice perspective should imply for media studies”, in B. Bräuchler & J. Postill (eds.) Theorising Media and Practice. Oxford: Berghahn. • Helle-Valle, Jo and Ardis Storm-Mathisen. Gender as language-game – a practice perspective on gender. To be published in 2010?

3. My key words • Media • Our research theme – interesting because (i) it is both technology and media content, and (ii) it is in one sense a virtual reality, nevertheless it must always be seen as a situated practice (cf. e.g. Miller and Slater) • Practice theory and Late-Wittgenstein philosophy • Wittgenstein provides a key insight for practice theory, namely his fundamental and absolute dismissal of the idea of a any kind of structure that forms and underlies practice (cf. Helle-Valle 2009) • (I will return to it below, in relation to my discussion of gender) • Gender • is a troublesome term. It is closely tied to discourses and hence lack a proper foundation to practice. It is important to point out that research dealing with patterns of consumption among men and women is not necessarily gender research.

4. Case: 21 year old female gamer • Was interviewed twice: • As part of an all-female focus group in June 2008 • Alone, in her home, in May 2009 • in 2008 she was an ardent gamer – heavy into online role play games like World of Warcraft. But she portrays her gaming as a ‘girl thing’ • in 2009 she told us that she had quit playing online role games on her computer. Now she only played some, and much of her activity online was looking for food recipes and knitting patterns. • She had changed – not the least in the ways that she discursively presented herself as a young woman – yet at the same time it was easy to detect many similarities in her two narratives. Her story was that she was an independent, intelligent person who had her personal problems but could deal with them. She had cut down radically on her gaming but it was still an activity that she clearly associated with her femininity.

5. Gender • Research on men and women moved from sex to gender •  from men/women to masculinity/femininity • Implies detaching gendered forces from bodies, • e.g. men can have feminine aspects • Analytical implication: • Gender is no longer tied to biology but is a structural and socio-cultural force. • ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ thus become detached from bodies and are typically reduced to semiotics

6. Gender and Digital consumption • ‘ICT is masculine’ • Does it mean: • that there are only/mostly men who use it? • that it is considered by most people to be ‘manly’? • that not only the technology but also the media content is masculine? • But the fact is that approximately half of ICT-use is by women. • Should we distinguish between the technology and its use? • different uses? • gaming vs. work? • types of gaming?

7. World of Warcraft vs. SIMS?SIMS World of WarcraftFeminine Masculine

8. These images seemingly stereotypes gender and gaming – it suggests that gaming as such is masculine but that we find some games that are designed for women; games that are about relationships, families and other typically feminine values. • However, as the sketched case I earlier presented indicate –there are females that actually link their femininity to gaming – and not games like SIMS but games that are generally considered to be masculine.

9. Gender play and variations in masculine games

10. Does this mean that she is a deviant or that is a kind of a counter-hegemonic resistance? • What does such an explanation imply? • It is problematic because we turn gender into axiomatic entities: that whatever the majority of men do is what is ‘masculine’ and whatever the majority of women do is ‘feminine’. But what does that mean? I have yet to find a good, critical discussion on this. Because if this is the ‘definition’ of masculine and feminine it implies that the split between gender and sex is just an apparent split – it is simply the typical male vs the typical female.

11. If we instead of seeing gender as given entities with a general relevance take seriously the point that most theorists on practice theory emphasise: Namely that meaning-in-practice is always contextual, that meaning – and hence viewpoints, identities and dispositions – are linked to specific practical settings we can approach the question of gaming (hence consumption) and gender in a different and more fruitful way: then we would have to say that there is no given, generally applicable set of gendered values but that it varies according to the practical settings in which the gendering takes place. • Here we need the aide of Wittgenstein. With his term language-game he frees the issue of meaning (and identity) from grand discourses and firmly anchors it in practical contexts. It is a radical form of anti-essentialism • This also reintroduces the body into the analysis – context-specific meanings and gender variations must be related to the fact that in everyday life we operate with a two-sex model

12. In/dividuality • Taking seriously the centrality of context/language-game implies that we must let go of the dominant, yet unreflected, idea of the individual – that person who is ‘un-divided’, that think and acts according to an essentially given identity/personality • It should be replaced by a view of subjects as being in basic ways different depending on the contexts/language-games they are parts of. Thus, what counts as gendered gaming (or in a more general vein; consumption) differ from one context to another and the patterns of gendering is not guaranteed by individuality but by institutionalised contexts.

13. Conclusion • Gender plays an important role in gaming. But how? • Instead of using gender in the grand – but poorly explained – way we must acknowledge that practice has precedence and see gender as shifting with shifting contexts. • Thus, instead of taking as our starting point given hegemonic masculinity and femininity we must take an inductive, descriptive approach and see what masculinity and femininity means in any given context/language-game. • This implies seeing persons as emerging from the tension between dividual and individual aspects/relations” (LiPuma: 1998 s. 57) • Thus every subject is a shifting constellation of feminine and masculine aspects that shift with, and is patterned by, communicative contexts, not by individual identities. Analyses of these shifts and variations must be anchored in the sexed body.

14. Female avatar