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Are We All Speaking of the Same Feminazi? Understanding the Nuances of a Gendered Slur in Gaming Culture

image of Are We All Speaking of the Same Feminazi? Understanding the Nuances of a Gendered Slur in Gaming Culture

This chapter examines the complex use of the gendered slur “feminazi” within online gaming discourse. Originally coined to target militant feminists, the term has evolved in digital spaces and now functions as a marker of broader cultural conflicts over gender and power. By analyzing posts, forum discussions, and prior research in both game studies and Natural Language Processing (NLP), the study reveals that the interpretation of “feminazi” is deeply subjective. The meaning attributed to it varies according to the annotator’s gender, race, class, and socio-cultural background, leading to significant disagreement over its classification as misogynistic or merely provocative. The chapter further situates these findings within the context of well-documented events such as #Gamergate and debates on toxic masculinity in gaming culture. It argues that the polarized responses to the term are indicative of a broader struggle over identity and inclusivity in digital communities. Ultimately, the study calls for a more nuanced understanding of hate speech that accounts for the plurality of perspectives and contexts in which such language is deployed, suggesting that simplistic categorizations may obscure the rich tapestry of online interactions.

Keywords: gaming culture ; gendered slurs ; misogyny ; online discourse ; subjectivity ; toxicity

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References

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References

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     [Google Scholar]
  2. Almanea, Dina and Massimo Poesio (2022). “ArMIS: The Arabic Misogyny and Sexism Corpus with Annotator Subjective Disagreements,” in Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, ed. Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, […] and Stelios Piperidis. Paris: European Language Resources Association, 2282–91.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Assunção, Carina (2016). “‘No Girls on the Internet’: The Experience of Female Gamers in the Masculine Space of Violent Gaming,” Press Start 3.1: 46–65.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Bezio, Kristin M.S. (2018). “Ctrl-Alt-Del: GamerGate as a Precursor to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” Leadership 14.5: 556–66.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Bjørkelo, Kristian A. (2022). “Playing with Boundaries: Empirical Studies of Transgressions and Gaming Culture,” PhD thesis, The University of Bergen.
  6. Boudreau, Kelly (2019). “Beyond Fun: Transgressive Gameplay—Toxic and Problematic Player Behavior as Boundary Keeping,” in Transgression in Games and Play, ed. Kristine Jørgensen and Faltin Karlsen. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 257–69.
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  7. Burrill, Derek (2018). “‘We’re Going to Have to Do Things That Are Unthinkable’: Masculinity/Games/Torture,” Masculinities in Play, ed. Nicholas Taylor and Gerald Voorhees. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 23–36.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Chess, Shira and Adrienne Shaw (2015). “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 59.1: 208–20.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Chess, Shira and Adrienne Shaw (2016). “We Are All Fishes Now: DiGRA, Feminism, and GamerGate,” Transactions of the Digital Games Research Association 2.2: 21–30.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Fersini, Elisabetta, Debora Nozza, and Paolo Rosso (2018). “Overview of the Evalita 2018 Task on Automatic Misogyny Identification (AMI),” in EVALITA Evaluation of NLP and Speech Tools for Italian, ed. Tommaso Caselli, Nicole Novielli, Viviana Patti, and Paolo Rosso. Torino: Accademia University Press, 59–66.
     [Google Scholar]
  11. Frenda, Simona, Bilal Ghanem, Manuel Montes-y-Gómez, and Paolo Rosso (2019). “Online Hate Speech against Women: Automatic Identification of Misogyny and Sexism on Twitter,” Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems 36.5: 4743–52.
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  12. Goffman, Erving (2017). Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-Face Behavior. New York: Routledge.
  13. Gray, Kishonna L., Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen (2018). “Introduction: Reframing Hegemonic Conceptions of Women and Feminism in Gaming Culture,” in Feminism in Play, ed. Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 1–17.
     [Google Scholar]
  14. Hawley, George (2017). Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia University Press.
  15. Jane, Emma (2017). Misogyny Online: A Short (and Brutish) History. London: SAGE Publications.
  16. Kendall, Lori (2011). “‘White and Nerdy’: Computers, Race, and the Nerd Stereotype: White and Nerdy,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.3: 505–24.
     [Google Scholar]
  17. Lenz, Claudia (2011). “Konstruksjon Av Den Andre: Teoretiske Og Historiske Perspektiver,” in Forestillinger Om Jøder: Aspekter Ved Konstruksjonen Av En Minoritet 1814–1940, ed. Vibeke Moe and Øivind Kopperud. Oslo: Unipub, S. 9–34.
     [Google Scholar]
  18. Maloney, Marcus, Steven Roberts, and Timothy Graham (2019). Gender, Masculinity and Video Gaming: Analysing Reddit’s r/Gaming Community. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
  19. Massanari, Adrienne L. (2017). “#Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures,” New Media & Society 19.3: 329–46.
     [Google Scholar]
  20. Massanari, Adrienne L. (2018). “Rethinking Research Ethics, Power, and the Risk of Visibility in the Era of the ‘Alt-Right’ Gaze,” Social Media + Society 4.2. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118768302.
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  21. Menczer, Filippo, R. Fulper, G.L. Ciampaglia, E. Ferrara, Y. Ahn, A. Flammini, B. Lewis, and K. Rowe (2015). “Misogynistic Language on Twitter and Sexual Violence,” Semantic Scholar, January 20. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1291081.v1.
  22. Mortensen, Torill Elvira (2016). “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate,” Games and Culture 13.8: 787–806.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Mulki, Hala and Bilal Ghanem (2021). “Let-Mi: An Arabic Levantine Twitter Dataset for Misogynistic Language,” in Proceedings of the Sixth Arabic Natural Language Processing Workshop, ed. Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Hazem Hajj, Walid Magdy, Wajdi Zaghouani, Fethi Bougares, […] and Samia Touileb. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics, 154–63.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Nagle, Angela (2017). Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right. London: Zero Books.
  25. Rudman, Chelsea (2012). “‘Feminazi’: The History of Limbaugh’s Trademark Slur against Women,” Media Matters for America, March 12. https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/feminazi-history-limbaughs-trademark-slur-against-women. Accessed May 20, 2025.
     [Google Scholar]
  26. Salter, Anastasia and Bridget Blodgett (2012). “Hypermasculinity and Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56.3: 401–16.
     [Google Scholar]
  27. Vossen, Emma (2018). “The Magic Circle and Consent in Gaming Practices,” in Feminism in Play, ed. Kishonna L. Gray, Gerald Voorhees, and Emma Vossen. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 205–20.
     [Google Scholar]
  28. Waseem, Zeerak, Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Dirk Hovy, and Joel Tetreault (2017). “Understanding Abuse: A Typology of Abusive Language Detection Subtasks,” in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online, ed. Zeerak Waseem, Wendy Hui Kyong Chung, Dirk Hovy, and Joel Tetreault. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics, 78–84.
     [Google Scholar]
  29. Zeinert, Philine, Nanna Inie, and Leon Derczynski (2021). “Annotating Online Misogyny,” in Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), ed. Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, and Roberto Navigli. Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics, 3181–97.
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