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Nick Taylor
Nick Taylor is an associate professor of digital media in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University, where he carries out critical and ethnographic research with communities who take play seriously. These include, among others, collegiate esports athletes and LEGO enthusiasts. He is the lead editor (with Gerald Voorhees) of Masculinities in Play, the first collection to examine the multiple intersections between gaming and masculinities; and the lead editor (with Chris Ingraham) of LEGOfied: Building Blocks as Media, a volume that explores how LEGO functions as a “materially digital” medium. Currently, he is working on a monograph that explores the gendered politics shaping the material places in which we play digital games, from campus computer labs to esports tournaments to man caves.
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Abstract
Esports’ gender-based inequalities remain intractable, particularly among the highest levels of competition and also, increasingly, in the burgeoning North American collegiate esports scene. Rather than viewing these inequalities as merely incidental to the professionalization of competitive gaming, particularly in North America, I argue that esports arose as a response to the threat of greater gender-based equity in gaming cultures. Esports does not have a gender problem; it is a gender problem. This article connects three historical transformations in the history of professionalized spectator sports in order to constitute a media genealogy of esports and a prehistory of its gender troubles. Through a series of vignettes—a late nineteenth-century boxing match, a mid-twentieth-century football game, and a 2008 esports tournament—I trace the development of “kinaesthetic masculinity”: the capacity for masculine subjects to feel a sense of belonging, by virtue of broadcasting media techniques and infrastructures, to aestheticized (and most often violent) competition between men.