Christine H Tran
Biographic Data
| ID | 6715277 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christine H Tran |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christine H |
| FAMILY NAME | Tran |
| SIGNATURE | TRAN C H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1975-5046 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 7 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Contextual governance & androcentric hegemony on Twitch.tv
Twitch’s Terms of Service (ToS) and Community Guidelines (CG) policies forbid discriminatory behavior and harassment, but many streamers from marginalized communities have been victimized while their harassers go unpunished. These inconsistencies in how safety violations are managed prompted the author(s) to perform a two-stage analysis of Twitch’s platform governance strategies to understand the relationship between platform governance and andro…
Recontextualizing Violence in Real Time: Live Streaming & the Governance of Inconsistency on TWITCH.TV
How does inconsistency become an institution? Here, we examine platform governance and moderation on Amazon’s Twitch.tv as a cultural practice. Through case studies and thematic analysis, we showcase moments of regulatory inconsistency that are constitutive of how Twitch manages harm. Our analysis identifies contexts, temporalities, and violence as critical themes for identifying Twitch’s inconsistent moderation. We offer a playbook for better un…
Twitch spouse: Livestreaming and the legacy of spousal labour in the video game industry
Precarious careers in the games industry have long relied on the unpaid and largely feminized support of spouses and family members. This paper addresses the role of spouses and other domestic cohabitants in the production of live game broadcasts on Twitch, Amazon’s world-leading platform in live video entertainment. I introduce the heuristic of the ‘Twitch Spouse’ to underscore the crucial role that domestic partners have played as invisible wor…
Room with a viewership: Visibility work & Twitch.tv in the domestic context
This paper argues for the domestic worksites of marginalized game streamers as a crucial site for understanding the politics of visibility work on platforms. Twitch.tv stands out as Amazon’s world-leading platform for live video entertainment. Through ethnographic interactions with Twitch creators (n = 12), I clarify the challenges marginalized individuals face in livestreaming’s platformization of game cultures. While streaming provides opportun…
Bleeding Purple, Seeing Pink: Domestic Visibility, Gender & Social Reproduction in the Home Studios of TWITCH.TV
From greenscreens in the bedroom to webcams on refrigerators, household surfaces underlie the broadcast of personality on Twitch.tv, Amazon’s $15 billion platform for live video entertainment. This paper examines how homemaking and visibility are co-conceptualized in the labour of gendered and racialized game live streamers. Drawing from a virtual ethnography of Twitch creators’ domestic spaces in North America (n=12), I document the staging of h…
Verified play, precarious work: GamerGate and platformed authenticity in the cultural industries
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced…
Never Battle Alone”: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as “Real” Work
From 2018 to 2021, the “egirl” witnessed a radical shift from her origins as a sexualized slur in online gaming. Through critical discourse analysis of news media of this period, this paper interprets this transformation within two primary phenomena: (1) the growth of women game influencers who reclaimed “egirl” slurs in their self-branding and (2) the launch of “Egirl.gg,” a platform for paid gaming companions. I argue that live streaming platfo…
Authentification at the Edge: ”Gamergate”-Ing the Ascent of the Verified Internet
While platforms may be hard to know, they are increasingly invested in knowing—and policing— users. From “verified accounts” to “two-factor authentication,” platform affordances have proffered metrics of “authenticity” as an antidote to the uncertainties of attention economies, which are ostensibly saturated by fake news, misinformation, and algorithmic radicalization (Haimson & Hoffman, 2016; Caplan, 2020). Yet the platformization of realness cl…
Playing at the Polls: Video Games in/as Platforms of Political Participation
This panel explores the rise of ludic technologies as both figurative and computational “platforms” for American political participation. As COVID-19 forced many politicians to abandon massive rallies and other in-person engagement into 2020, American politicians turned to video games for alternative means of public outreach, from “Biden Island” in $2 to Twitch streams with Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. This panel contextualizes th…
Playing with/at Work
Stream(Age) Queens: Zoom-Bombs, Glitter Bombs & Other Doctoral Fairy Tales
Never Battle Alone”: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as “Real” Work
From 2018 to 2021, the “egirl” witnessed a radical shift from her origins as a sexualized slur in online gaming. Through critical discourse analysis of news media of this period, this paper interprets this transformation within two primary phenomena: (1) the growth of women game influencers who reclaimed “egirl” slurs in their self-branding and (2) the launch of “Egirl.gg,” a platform for paid gaming companions. I argue that live streaming platfo…
Verified play, precarious work: GamerGate and platformed authenticity in the cultural industries
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced…
Authentification at the Edge: ”Gamergate”-Ing the Ascent of the Verified Internet
While platforms may be hard to know, they are increasingly invested in knowing—and policing— users. From “verified accounts” to “two-factor authentication,” platform affordances have proffered metrics of “authenticity” as an antidote to the uncertainties of attention economies, which are ostensibly saturated by fake news, misinformation, and algorithmic radicalization (Haimson & Hoffman, 2016; Caplan, 2020). Yet the platformization of realness cl…
Playing at the Polls: Video Games in/as Platforms of Political Participation
This panel explores the rise of ludic technologies as both figurative and computational “platforms” for American political participation. As COVID-19 forced many politicians to abandon massive rallies and other in-person engagement into 2020, American politicians turned to video games for alternative means of public outreach, from “Biden Island” in $2 to Twitch streams with Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. This panel contextualizes th…
Playing with/at Work
Stream(Age) Queens: Zoom-Bombs, Glitter Bombs & Other Doctoral Fairy Tales
Never Battle Alone”: Egirls and the Gender(ed) War on Video Game Live Streaming as “Real” Work
From 2018 to 2021, the “egirl” witnessed a radical shift from her origins as a sexualized slur in online gaming. Through critical discourse analysis of news media of this period, this paper interprets this transformation within two primary phenomena: (1) the growth of women game influencers who reclaimed “egirl” slurs in their self-branding and (2) the launch of “Egirl.gg,” a platform for paid gaming companions. I argue that live streaming platfo…
Bleeding Purple, Seeing Pink: Domestic Visibility, Gender & Social Reproduction in the Home Studios of TWITCH.TV
From greenscreens in the bedroom to webcams on refrigerators, household surfaces underlie the broadcast of personality on Twitch.tv, Amazon’s $15 billion platform for live video entertainment. This paper examines how homemaking and visibility are co-conceptualized in the labour of gendered and racialized game live streamers. Drawing from a virtual ethnography of Twitch creators’ domestic spaces in North America (n=12), I document the staging of h…
Verified play, precarious work: GamerGate and platformed authenticity in the cultural industries
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced…
Twitch spouse: Livestreaming and the legacy of spousal labour in the video game industry
Precarious careers in the games industry have long relied on the unpaid and largely feminized support of spouses and family members. This paper addresses the role of spouses and other domestic cohabitants in the production of live game broadcasts on Twitch, Amazon’s world-leading platform in live video entertainment. I introduce the heuristic of the ‘Twitch Spouse’ to underscore the crucial role that domestic partners have played as invisible wor…
Room with a viewership: Visibility work & Twitch.tv in the domestic context
This paper argues for the domestic worksites of marginalized game streamers as a crucial site for understanding the politics of visibility work on platforms. Twitch.tv stands out as Amazon’s world-leading platform for live video entertainment. Through ethnographic interactions with Twitch creators (n = 12), I clarify the challenges marginalized individuals face in livestreaming’s platformization of game cultures. While streaming provides opportun…
Recontextualizing Violence in Real Time: Live Streaming & the Governance of Inconsistency on TWITCH.TV
How does inconsistency become an institution? Here, we examine platform governance and moderation on Amazon’s Twitch.tv as a cultural practice. Through case studies and thematic analysis, we showcase moments of regulatory inconsistency that are constitutive of how Twitch manages harm. Our analysis identifies contexts, temporalities, and violence as critical themes for identifying Twitch’s inconsistent moderation. We offer a playbook for better un…
Contextual governance & androcentric hegemony on Twitch.tv
Twitch’s Terms of Service (ToS) and Community Guidelines (CG) policies forbid discriminatory behavior and harassment, but many streamers from marginalized communities have been victimized while their harassers go unpunished. These inconsistencies in how safety violations are managed prompted the author(s) to perform a two-stage analysis of Twitch’s platform governance strategies to understand the relationship between platform governance and andro…
Computer Science (6 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Digital Games and Media (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Digital Economy and Work Transformation (4 works) · Engineering (4 works) · Art (3 works)