”Boobs or gtfo” : A critical discourse analysis of blogs in the Swedish gaming

Research in the field of gaming and the gaming culture shows that the culture is characterized by sexism and hypermasculinity, however a majority of this research is conducted in an Anglo-Saxon context. Therefore the aim of this study was to elucidate the Swedish gaming discourse in relation to gender, gendered norms and stereotypes. We also sought to examine the relationship between the editorial content and the blog comments. The study was based on a critical discourse analysis with a gender perspective, applied to five Swedish gaming blogs. By implementing power theory and encoding/decoding theory, we have concluded that there is a discursive struggle, where one part of the gaming culture is characterized by male dominance, while the other part of the discourse is showing signs of resistance to this hypermasculinity. We found that there is a gap between how gender is portrayed among the blog comments in relationship to the editorial content.