Intervention via Interactivity: Video Games, Social Networks, and (De)Racialization

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Contemporary cultural life is replete with “interventions” – counternarratives that appear to challenge long-standing relations of power across sexual, racial, religious and other social fractures. Such interventions are often facilitated by interactive media forms and platforms – from memes to GIFs, video games to social networking sites. Emerging technologies have risen above the structural constraints on participation that hobbled legacy media and enabled marginalized voices to have a say in negotiations of social power. But how successful are such interventions? Has the ascription of technological agency to disempowered communities proved sufficient for upstaging hegemonic discourses? Or, do hegemonic discourses underlie and drive countercultural narratives too, becoming reified in the process? Especially interesting in this regard are the ostensibly countercultural practices of institutions of power, such as corporate entities that control digital technologies. Do their interactive interventions help to dissolve social fractures? Or, do they simply appropriate and commodify counternarratives to reproduce power?
The four papers in this panel approach these critical questions from a variety of angles. Kishonna Gray explores the paradox of women of color’s “invisible marginality” in video games, reflected in their absence as playable characters, sitting alongside their “hyper-visibility” as sexualized images in the same digital space. Using Black Digital feminism, Gray discusses women of color’s efforts to re-appropriate this hegemonic imagery through memes and GIFs on social media. David Stephens and Lisa Hanasono examine how Black communities represent their experiences on the hashtag #GrowingUpBlack. Focusing on the interplay of text and images, Stephens and Hanasono argue that access to meme creator applications affords Black communities greater control over narratives that shape their lives. Andre Brock problematizes the perceived counternarrative of Hangar 13’s Mafia III, a video game with a Black protagonist set in a fictionalized 1968 New Orleans. Situating it within the broader context of gaming genres with Black protagonists over the past decade, Brock suggests that rather than challenge racism, such representations reify it by reducing Black characters to stereotyped roles or by adopting a colorblind ideology. Finally, Saif Shahin looks at American-Muslims’ – especially Muslim women’s – attempt to counter the demonization of Islam in the United States on social media – with a little help from liberal Californian lawmakers and liberal supporters of the Democratic party during Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Shahin argues that this seemingly liberal counternarrative in fact reproduces an Orientalist discourse within which Muslims are determined to be “good” or “bad” depending on whether or not they support the ideology of American Empire.

Sub Unit

• Ethnicity and Race in Communication

Cosponsor

• Game Studies

Chair

• Saif Shahin, SACA - South Asia Communication Association

Individual Presentations

• Using Black Digital Feminism to Examine the Sexualized Hypervisibility and Invisibility of Women of Color in Video Games - Kishonna Leah Gray, Eastern Kentucky U

• #GrowingUpBlack: Communication and Resistance in Memes - David Stephens, Bowling Green State U; Lisa Kiyomi Hanasono, Bowling Green State U

• Anti-Blackness in the Machine - Andre Brock, U of Michigan

• Barbarians at the Twitter Gate: A Social Network Analysis of #MuslimAwarenessMonth and #CanYouHearUsNow - Saif Shahin, SACA - South Asia Communication Association

Respondent

• Andre Brock, U of Michigan