In this paper, we detail the conditions of precarity that women face as marginal subjects in the video games industry and as sexualized objects in its creative and cultural projects. We do so through the documentation of recent examples of violent, vitriolic, and hate-filled speech that has been targeted at women who have either spoken out from those margins, or who have been made the object of ridicule from with within the industry’s ranks. These examples demonstrate a form of extreme gender norm reinforcement that has been challenged through feminist activist work in a number of locales in North America. We also recount two activist projects in Canada that reveal how women remain precarious subjects even as they work to overcome their entrenched conditions of precarity through activist, women’s only groups, concluding with an accounting of a governing social and political order that ontologically re-inscribes women and their potential, actual creative capital and labour as peripheral.
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