Cheerleaders/Booth Babes/Halo Hoes: Pro-gaming, Gender, and Jobs for the Boys Nicholas Taylor Jen Jenson Suzanne de Castell PhD Candidate Associate Professor Professor Faculty of Education Faculty of Education Faculty of Education York University York University Simon Fraser University
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Abstract In recent years, a 'professional' digital gaming industry has emerged in North America: this interconnected series of organizations and leagues host competitive gaming tournaments (often televised) in which young, mostly male participants compete for increasingly lucrative prize money and sponsorship contracts. Taking up Jo Bryce and Jason Rutter!s (2005) challenge to confront the ways girl gamers are rendered “invisible” by gamers, researchers, and designers, this paper maps the various ways women participate in a set of practices around the organization, promotion and performance of competitive gaming, framed as the exclusive domain of (young, straight, middle class) male bodies. Mothers flying their sons' teams to events all over North America, female players participating in tournaments, or promotional models operating sponsorship booths, the women who participate in competitive gaming tournaments negotiate different expectations and carry out different kinds of embodied work. Each of these 'roles', however, is tenuously maintained within a community that most commonly reads female participation in sexualized terms: mothers at events describe themselves as 'cheerleaders', female players risk being labeled as 'halo hoes', and promotional models become 'booth babes'. Biographies Nick Taylor is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Education at York. His research interests include educational game design, research methodologies and online gaming, and new media-based pedagogies.