Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University
About
Megan Condis is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Stephen F. Austin State University. Her book project, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2018.
Current Work:
In Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, Dr. Condis examines literature, film, and video games to explain how the term "gamer" has been constructed in the popular imagination using an innovative combination of poststructuralist gender theory, close textual reading, and a rigorous analysis of visual and verbal online posts. The gamer identity is policed from within across overlapping textual sites such as novels, games, press releases and advertisements, forum posts, and internet memes. These texts simultaneously shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity and serve as a tool of intervention for women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demanding broader access to gaming culture. These competing discourses are creating rifts within the culture, as recent trending topics like #GamerGate, an online movement that has resulted in threats and harassment aimed at female game developers and critics, have shown. Looking at the cultural practices of online gamers can enable academics to re-think their understanding of identities commonly thought to be rooted in the body. Dr. Condis argues that we can best understand how gender and sexuality function in our increasingly networked world if we think of them using gamer logic.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Digital humanities, gender, online culture, video games, rhetoric
