A Critical Exploration of the Social Dimensions of Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Two E-rated Closed-Circuit Video Games
By Sam Wauthier-Paspuleti
Sociology
University of Windsor, PhD.
Unceded Territory of the Three Fires Confederacy
Abstract
Although in recent decades ‘virtual worlds’ have gained much popularity among ethnographers as acceptable sites for approaching any number of contemporary social issues, upon entering the field virtual ethnographers often have little to no prior understanding or personal connection to these spaces and as a result place less analytic emphasis on the researcher and more on his or her participants (i.e. who, how and why social actors utilize these third spaces). In an effort to offer a more reflexive and holistic approach to examining ‘the virtual’ this paper employed a critical approach to first, investigate how gender, sexuality, and the family have been designed in the virtual worlds of two G-rated role-playing video games and second, consider how these very same games qualify as a third space, through which constructions of gender, sexuality, and the family can be navigated and negotiated.
Keywords: the virtual self, childhood sexualities, gender bending, sexual scripts, third spaces.