Megan Condis is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University. She completed her PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the spring of 2015 and she previously spent three years as as Assistant Professor of English at Steven F. Austin State University. Her book, Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, examines the performance of masculinity in video game subcultures. It was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2018. She blogs about gender and popular culture at http://megancondis.wordpress.com/ Supervisors: Stephanie Foote and Lisa Nakamura
The strange saga of a fake female gamer and her encounter with the misogynistic world of e-sports... more The strange saga of a fake female gamer and her encounter with the misogynistic world of e-sports.
Collegiality is integral to the healthy functioning of any academic department and is a necessary... more Collegiality is integral to the healthy functioning of any academic department and is a necessary professional attribute for new faculty, who often spent their graduate school careers with relatively little involvement in institutional politics, to develop. However, the recent trend to explicitly outline tenure and promotion requirements for collegial behavior gives us pause. We question if a collegiality statement for tenure and promotion could function as yet another obstacle between faculty from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented in the academy (women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, etcetera) and their bids for tenure.
An interview with Andrew Reinhard, author of Archaeogaming:
An Introduction to Archaeology in and... more An interview with Andrew Reinhard, author of Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games
The strange saga of a fake female gamer and her encounter with the misogynistic world of e-sports... more The strange saga of a fake female gamer and her encounter with the misogynistic world of e-sports.
Collegiality is integral to the healthy functioning of any academic department and is a necessary... more Collegiality is integral to the healthy functioning of any academic department and is a necessary professional attribute for new faculty, who often spent their graduate school careers with relatively little involvement in institutional politics, to develop. However, the recent trend to explicitly outline tenure and promotion requirements for collegial behavior gives us pause. We question if a collegiality statement for tenure and promotion could function as yet another obstacle between faculty from backgrounds that have historically been underrepresented in the academy (women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ individuals, people with disabilities, etcetera) and their bids for tenure.
An interview with Andrew Reinhard, author of Archaeogaming:
An Introduction to Archaeology in and... more An interview with Andrew Reinhard, author of Archaeogaming: An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games
“Megan Condis addresses the most important and contentious controversies in gaming culture at p... more “Megan Condis addresses the most important and contentious controversies in gaming culture at present. Her writing argues strongly against the groups who have tried to undermine the diversity arising in games and provides a passionate insight into these events, linking them with wider cultural shifts in Western society.”—Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Staffordshire University
“Fierce, fun, and fascinating. Condis writes with a journalist’s ear and an academic’s eye, getting to the core of what drives men’s behavior online, in games, and throughout digital culture.”—Derek A. Burrill, author, Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture
In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture.
Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election.
Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.
Uploads
Papers by Megan Condis
January 26, 2019, p. SR8.
An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games
January 26, 2019, p. SR8.
An Introduction to Archaeology in and of Video Games
“Fierce, fun, and fascinating. Condis writes with a journalist’s ear and an academic’s eye, getting to the core of what drives men’s behavior online, in games, and throughout digital culture.”—Derek A. Burrill, author, Die Tryin’: Videogames, Masculinity, Culture
In 2016, a female videogame programmer and a female journalist were harassed viciously by anonymous male online users in what became known as GamerGate. Male gamers threatened to rape and kill both women, and the news soon made international headlines, exposing the level of abuse that many women and minorities face when participating in the predominantly male online culture.
Gaming Masculinity explains how the term “gamer” has been constructed in the popular imagination by a core group of male online users in an attempt to shore up an embattled form of geeky masculinity. This latest form of toxicity comes at a moment of upheaval in gaming culture, as women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals demand broader access and representation online. Paying close attention to the online practices of trolling and making memes, author Megan Condis demonstrates that, despite the supposedly disembodied nature of life online, performances of masculinity are still afforded privileged status in gamer culture. Even worse, she finds that these competing discourses are not just relegated to the gaming world but are creating rifts within the culture at large, as witnessed by the direct links between the GamerGate movement and the recent rise of the alt-right during the last presidential election.
Condis asks what this moment can teach us about the performative, collaborative, and sometimes combative ways that American culture enacts race, gender, and sexuality. She concludes by encouraging designers and those who work in the tech industry to think about how their work might have, purposefully or not, been developed in ways that are marked by gender.