Mulheres do jogo ao Fandom : uma análise sobre Jaina Proudmoore

Abstract

Digital games have been studied in recent years as complex cultural products, part of a circuit that engenders and reverberates social structures through discursive power - similar to cinema and literature. Faced with this, fandoms have become important spaces for contesting and claiming discourses about these structures, especially about gender. Therefore, this work seeks to study the femininities articulated by digital games and fan productions, with the aim of investigating both the gender norms operated by these works as well as their uses as fan activism tactics. To this end, a strategy was adopted to analyze the production of the World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004) fandom and the female character Jaina Proudmoore. Starting on a theoretical foundation based initially on the concepts of gender (CONNELL; PEARSE, 2015; BUTLER, 2018; LOURO, 2003) and gender technology (LAURETIS, 1987), the study navigates to the discussions about power disputes in fandoms (JOHNSON, 2017; FISKE, 1992), the modes of fan activism (BROUGH; SHRESTHOVA, 2012; STANFILL, 2020), and how this dialogues with the conditions and representations of women in these spaces. From this theoretical perspective, a statistical reading of theWorld ofWarcraft fandom is made through the collection of fanfics and fanarts published in the Archive of Our Own repository and on the DeviantArt platform, and then an analysis of the visual verb texts (ABRIL, 2007) produced by the fans about the character Jaina and the canonical images of the game.