“It Sucks for Me, and It Sucks for Them”: The Emotional Labor of Women Twitch Streamers

Abstract

Increasing and sustaining women’s participation in gaming spheres is a persistent problem DiGRA audiences are familiar with. This paper looks at the barriers to increasing and sustaining women’s participation on Twitch through examining the experiences of women streamers. Emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) is used as a framework for interpreting how these women’s individual experiences resonate within larger societal contexts of work and play more broadly. The paper relies on data from 8 in-depth interviews with international, English-speaking women who receive a primary or secondary income source from Twitch streaming videogames. The results of this study show that participants performed emotional labor, on top of the mental and physical labor of playing videogames on a live stream, and this emotional labor has potential negative implications for the longevity of their streaming careers.