Popular Culture & The Civic Imagination: "Who and What Belongs: #Gamergate and Abjection" (1 of 2)
/Who and What Belongs: #Gamergate and Abjection
Steven Proudfoot and joan miller
As part of the series of blog posts spurred on by the recent publication "Popular Culture and the Civic Imagination," I'm here to talk to joan miller about her chapter in the book and her work today. Both of us are doctoral students at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication. joan is currently in the fifth-year of her program, working on her dissertation, while I am a first-year, looking forward to the future. The chapter we’re discussing here is #20. “For the Horde: Violent “Trolling” as Preemptive Strike via #GamerGate and the #AltRight” (214-22), it conceptualizes the #gamergate conflict as a virtual war between two competing imagined publics and demonstrates the ways in which the civic imagination can become a site of conflict and abjection.
[Note: Since we conducted this interview as more of a conversation than a formalized process, we have used bracketed interjections throughout as a way to reflect the conversational dynamic of our discussion as well as to add some post-hoc notes.]
Steven Proudfoot: So, I think it'd be good to start with a discussion of where we are now in 2020 since Gamergate happened in 2014. You mentioned that you started working on this piece in 2015, how has this progressed or changed since then?
joan miller: That’s a good question. I think the term #gamergate has kind of fallen out of popular consciousness or people see it as this old-news kind of thing as if it hit a crux and then just stopped. It obviously didn’t — that’s just not how social phenomenon like that work most of the time — like I argued in my chapter, they kind of dispersed themselves among groups with different names but the same ideology and tactics.
I think as Brianna Wu argues, we can see the tactics of gamergate being used by lots of folks in the #altright and even to some extent on the left when we hear about some ostensible Sanders supporters doing it to folks from the Nevada hospitality union.
It’s obviously very concerning and I think that’s probably why my chapter is still valuable even though the phenomenon has morphed into something else.
SP: There’s a line that you quoted early in your piece that touches on this idea very well: ". . . This hashtag was the canary in the coal mine, and we missed it” (214). It captures the idea that this whole event was more about the who, what, and how it ostracized and labeled people as bad and dangerous to the community. Seeing these tactics echoed across different spaces shows that it was less about the game and more about everything else. For me, as a then high school senior and a cisgendered man whose friend groups were primarily gamers, #gamergate was a strange experience for me. As such, most of my exposure to it was through YouTubers. Based on my demographic, it maybe isn't surprising that the videos YouTube threw my way were the anti-Quinn side. I'm ashamed to say that, at the time, some of the more moderate voices were hard to see through. Though, when aggressive voices (some of whom have since been revealed to be members of the AltRight) bashed folks like Quinn with vitriol, it wasn't hard to see the irrationality. Clearly, I was off-put by a lot of it, but at the time, some of the more mild arguments worked at first.
My experience with #gamergate shows a few key things that resonate with what you said here and in the chapter. First, these tactics work. When subsumed into an echo chamber of videos and peers, it can be hard to see through it in the moment, even though it’s easy to see in hindsight. That is scary. Second, many of the loudest voices were from the altright. The fact that these tactics crop up in different spaces, especially along with the altright, goes to show how resonant that quote was. Canary in the coal mine indeed.
jm: Right and that underscores my approach in that it is not a purely logical appeal and therefore we miss things when we use a purely logical analytical frame. In this case it has a lot to do with affect and affinity and group belonging. To bring in the discussion of abjection a little, the general idea as I understand it, is that abjection is the process by which we form an identity in contrast to another. So we could take a concept like whiteness. What is it to be white? Well, it’s to be someone other than a person of color and vise versa. The borders of that identity become clearer in opposition to each other. So gamergaters push away people and ideas who cause them to feel complex negative affect or tax their energy for complex critical thinking and then define their group of “us” through rejecting the group “them.”
In this same vein I recently did a dialogic essay with Carrie Lynn Reinhard where we discussed fandom and affect in relation to politics. One of the things we ultimately agreed upon — at least between us — was that fandom involves a group of people with a shared affect pointed in the same direction at an object or idea. So it became untenable emotionally for gamergaters to share a fandom with anti-gg because they had conflicting affect about the object (video games) of focus. For what it’s worth, as best I remember that definition of abjection comes from Mary Douglas purity and danger. [This is actually more Kristeva than Douglas, but both of them and Appadurai influenced my thinking on abjection and identity. The relevant quote can be found at the bottom of page 217 in the book.] I originally encountered all this thinking on abjection in a class with Karen Shimakwa at NYU. This chapter was originally a seminar paper for that class.
SP: I'm really glad that you brought the role of abjection to the front here. I think that this use and framing of #gamergate as a process of abjection is very astute. [thanks! jm] This observation particularly struck me because it's such a different context than how I, as a growing scholar, encountered work on abjection.
As an undergraduate English major, I took a lot of film classes, one of which was called "Horror and Gender." Unsurprisingly, Julia Kristeva's work on abjection was very central in a lot of that class. My conception of abjection was a bit more visceral and brings to mind body-horror and monsters, but the core of it, to my understanding is simply that which disturbs identities, systems, and/or societal order. Whether it’s visceral body horror or something more subtle, the abject part is that which disturbs that which it exists in.
[jm: Post-hoc interjection here. It’s worth noting that abjection can appear in different ways. Sometimes abjection comes from social/psychological things, sometimes it’s physical. The Appadurai piece I rely on talks a lot about gore and physical violence — my intervention was to bring that to the virtual world, where borders are less clear and thus the body horror aspects get bracketed.]
SP: Thinking and reading about abjection in relation to horror film situates the abject in a sometimes more clear sense, often literally monstrous. More critically, these representations of abjection in film often reflect the abject element with which society is currently preoccupied. [jm: Consider the Oscar-winning film ‘Parasite.’] So, I'm accustomed to thinking about society's abjection by looking in its reflections. Yet, what you did was point at it without the mirror of film.
A lot of work on abjection in the film space echoes what you identify in your chapter. To paraphrase Barbara Creed in her work on the "Monstrous-Feminine," she states that ritual contact with the abject element becomes a means by which societies exclude that element. I think that these GG videos bashing Depression Quest are a clear part of the process of "radically excluding" the abject element. By demonstrating that #gamergate defines Depression Quest and Quinn as that which is harmful to the system, and that those things need to be radically excluded for the good of the system, we can see a textbook example of abjection and the processes associated with suppressing it.
jm: This is all great [and I went through and edited a lot of our language around imposter syndrome and whether the anecdotes are valuable] because I truly believe that everyone’s story and POV are inherently valuable, including yours.
So yeah. This is a really interesting way to discuss abjection because what you’re saying really underscores the ways that Arjun Appadurai takes up abjection to explain intercultural violence and genocide (see p.218). Conveniently, that’s also the seed of this article. We read an excerpt from Fear of Small Numbers (and of course, this being a seminar assignment, I was required to include articles from the readings) that talked about the violence between groups like the Hutus and Tutsis as a way of knowing the other through violent abjection. There remains no more ambiguity between what is me and what is them when “me” has the power to turn “them” inside out and upside down. I won’t describe the actual torture that was discussed but I saw a parallel between the violence done to physical bodies in those spaces versus the radical dismembering of virtual identities through doxxing and harassment. One of the things I wanted to assert — that wasn’t necessarily as widely accepted then as it is now — is that virtual violence is real violence and has real victims.
Appadurai also underscores that this pattern is particularly likely among folks who live in close quarters on a daily basis where there is a lot of intermingling between the opposed groups. It then becomes necessary — emotionally — to resolve the frightening ambiguity between us and them. In gg, the communities are “imagined” in that they don’t necessarily exist in meat-space except on special occasions and even then only parts are visible. The internet allows for this virtual space that is both infinitely large and impossibly intimate. There’s room for every single gamergater but there’s absolutely no room for ambiguous others like Brianna Wu or Anita Sarkeesian or, it’s worth noting, people like me.
By using virtual and emotional violence gg-ers can push others off the internet and therefore out of existence. Hence, this is why I frame the two parties as “imagined publics in revolt.” I haven’t seen the Ready Player One film, but I’ve read the book and I’m imagining the climactic battle scene where all the players fight the corporate NPCs. And because emotions live in the body, those affects don’t stay in the virtual world and that violence crosses realms so-to-speak. As if your video game character dying resulted in you feeling real pain.
Don’t even get me started about the nature of pain and emotions, that’s a whole ‘nother book.
Steven Proudfoot is a PhD student at USC's Annenberg school of communication. He studies video games and fandom, especially where they intersect in fields of psychology and cultural studies.
joan miller is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, and a transmedia artist with a broadly interdisciplinary approach. joan’s work focuses on empathy at the intersection of media fandom and politics. Her dissertation — tentatively titled “The Use of Feeling” explores the ways in which empathy and pathos govern our behavior both in relation to our fandom and to our communities at large. joan is especially interested in themes of kinship, empathic communication and anti-colonialist approaches to producing media scholarship. Currently her attention is focused on theorizing and prototyping a methodology of fandom studies inspired by Bardic and Griotic traditions of the values and necessities for community storytelling.
