Abstract

Over the past decades, video games have emerged as one of the most influential media products in popular culture, conveying a multitude of messages and symbols that reflect as well as shape social reality. This paper aims to explore how video games contribute to the construction and perpetuation of gender stereotypes within a cultural context dominated by the phallogocentric paradigm. Through the analysis of Jacques Derrida’s theories on the logocentric paradigm and différance, together with Judith Butler’s reflections on gendered performativity, it will be explored how language and video game representations act as performative acts co-producing reality. Acts, which not only consolidate social norms, producing hate speech and discrimination at times when images that are not “appropriate” are represented, but can also offer possibilities for rewriting and resisting such structures. The introduction of the concept of iterability, applied to the sphere of language in relation to both gender performativity and videogame dynamics, opens up a stimulating reflection on the subversive potential inherent in videogames themselves, which are not mere reflections of the dominant culture, but active tools in the definition and redefinition of gender “identities”. The analysis proposed here is therefore intended to analyse not only the stereotyped and phallogocentric gender representations within video games, focusing on instances of hate-spreading, but rather the occasions in which these media products pose as instruments of resistance, challenging traditional binarisms and offering new identity models.