'Love you guys (No Homo)': how gamers and fans play with sexuality, gender, and Minecraft on YouTube

Potts, Amanda ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4598-6577 2015. 'Love you guys (No Homo)': how gamers and fans play with sexuality, gender, and Minecraft on YouTube. Critical Discourse Studies 12 (2) , pp. 163-186. 10.1080/17405904.2014.974635

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Abstract

This paper explores queer discourses produced by a group of very popular professional video game players on social media, with particular focus on the impact that this has on the language and interactions of the fan community. Three data sets have been incorporated into this study, allowing for analysis of the central data, as well as consideration of the production and investigation of the reception of the discourse contained within. These include 63 YouTube videos, a corpus of 217,916 comments on these videos, and an interview with a gamer. While the majority of the discursive data in the YouTube videos features interactions between heterosexual males, the introduction of homosocial meaning and homosexual innuendo into videos gives the (largely adolescent, male) audience a unique opportunity to encounter, interpret, and experiment with queer discourse. It is found that the production of nonheteronormative discourses by prominent gamers online has contributed to the formation of a self-policing fan community that advocates acceptance and rejects bigotry.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sexuality, gender, identity, masculinity, gaming, YouTube, Minecraft, fandom, virtual communities, corpus linguistics
Additional Information:	© 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Themoral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted.
Publisher:	Routledge
ISSN:	1740-5904
Funders:	ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science [grant number ES/K002155/1]
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	04 May 2023 20:22
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/76201

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