Chivalry, subordination and courtship culture: Being a ‘Woman’ in online games

Computer and video gaming are social activities, where people with different backgrounds, different nationalities and different ages meet. Research dating back to the early years of online gaming proposed that individual backgrounds were especially irrelevant online and that, consequently, games could be arenas for exploring new identities, gender relations and sexualities. Taking this as a starting point, we report in this article from an interview study. The results confirm that gaming is an activity where the participants’ backgrounds might be largely ignored. This also includes gender insofar as the participants can choose what gender to assume. However, whereas individual online gender (female or male) can be chosen freely, femininity and what it is like to be a woman are represented as being rather rigid. The article explores this tension between the free choice of the female position and its fixed content in relation to assumptions of the transgressive nature of computer gaming.