Direct Streamer Interactions With Their Audience to Build an Online Community: DEERE, LGBTQ+, and Drag Culture

• In Event: Designing Live-Streaming Ecologies: Learning in and Across Synchronous Media

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the arrangement of participants and streamers of Twitch, specifically DEERE, an LGBTQ+ streamer and drag queen, a member of Stream Queens group on Twitch. We investigate DEERE’s presence and engagement with the LGBTQ+ community, and Twitch at large is important and enormously consequential as we continue to rely on the internet for social connections. We investigate the practices that sustain digital queerness and the contribution to a social movement on hegemonic gaming spaces.

Kara Keeling’s (2014) article “Queer OS,” explores how digital queerness is created and sustained through new media cybernetic practices and culture. This article describes a Queer Operating System that exists on a societal level which serves as a platform for bringing individuals together through shared digital spaces. The article relates to DEERE’s Twitch channel in the examination of how individuals leverage media to sustain communities built to explore queerness and sexuality.

Using an online digital ethnographic approach, we used Zoom recording feature to screen record live-streams of DEERE’s streams to capture moderator-deleted comments. We analyzed the recordings using activity logs and organized the content by notable participant and streamer interactions.

The data we collected are recordings of DEERE’s streams on 4/19/2020 and 4/24/2020. Screenshots taken from the recorded streams; we also took field notes and made activity logs which are organized by 2-minute intervals to provide more detailed descriptions of the chat box and the streamer.

The screenshots explain the viewer engagement of the stream. Adding to the stream with positive behavior -follow, tip, raid, or buy subscriptions to/for the channel- is always acknowledged, thanked, and reinforced by DEERE, perpetuating positive behavior and enhancing the channel. She rewards her channel participants with “Batties” which can be collected to use for polls, highlighting messages, and Thworps. On the flip side, negative comments and behavior are punished by DEERE. She takes action against those who negatively participate in the chat and removes them due to their malicious behavior and comments.

This study has implications for understanding how to create digital communities, like DEERE’s channel on Twitch. She has carved out a digitally-mediated space on Twitch allowing for both learning and challenging oppressive gender ideologies and conceptions about sexuality. DEERE’s stream serves to create a “safe space” to cultivate respect, admiration, and knowledge about the collaborative drag and LGBTQ+ community. There are already nuances in this space; those who actively and non-actively participate in the stream are expected to be mindful of their actions. There appears to be a feedback loop allowing for learning of channel boundaries. DEERE, her subscribers, and her followers leverage technology to shift cultural institutions in regards to the queer, trans, and drag community leading to a social movement that counters the traditional hegemonic nature of the Twitch platform and change the dominant narrative and ideology of Twitch. The application of DEERE’s streaming practices could be for after school programs that could transition to be created on online platforms to sustain communities.

Authors

• Jasmine Ayromlou

• Sandra Jacobo, University of California - Berkeley

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley