Deep Strike: Playing Gender in the World of Overwatch a Case Study of Geguri in Esport

Electronic sport or “eSport” has grown to a global-sport entertainment industry with a projected growth of 1.5 billion dollars (USD) by 2020 (Dunn, 2017). Despite its development and considerable attention from scholars within several disciplines, sport academics have largely focused on a philosophical question of whether this activity can be defined as sport (Funk, 2017). Scholarly interests and debates on the importance of eSport as a cultural space where diverse identities and representations traverse have been neglected within sociology of sport literature. The number of females entering the eSport community-- both as gamers and spectators-- is growing, yet the eSport arena remains overwhelmingly male dominated, and female gamers face online abuse and harassment in the form of sexism and/or racism (“Very few women”, 2016). For this presentation, we provide a case study of the South Korean female gamer, Kim Se-yeon, also known as Geguri, to discuss issues around gender in eSports. Drawing from feminist cultural scholarship, in particular, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, we conducted a textual analysis to address the androcentric and misogynistic nature of the contemporary gaming culture of eSport. It is further suggested that eSport has a subversive potential to de/reconstruct the inflexible categories regarding sex and gender in sport.