Video Game Culture, Contentious Masculinities, and Reproducing Racialized Social Class Divisions in Middle School

Abstract

This short article examines how the mutual shaping of gender and technology can contribute to the reproduction of racialized class divisions. The article is based on an indepth ethnographic study of the launch of a progressive New York City public middle school. The school aimed to integrate twenty-first century digital technologies and skills into the curriculum as it promoted student-centered learning and social equity. The article argues that educators and privileged parents constructed an educational context that facilitated and legitimized students who enacted masculinities rooted in "video game culture," as it disciplined and purged students who enacted masculinities rooted in more canonical forms of boy culture. In doing so, the school paradoxically helped perpetuate the racialized class divisions that it hoped new media would help it overcome.1 PRE-PRINT -To be published in Signs, 2014. A journal of women in culture and society.Recent feminist theorizing on relations between gender and technology emphasizes the ways that gender and technology mutually shape one another, what Wajcman (2007, 293) referred to as, "technology as both a source and a consequence of gender relations." In this short essay, I hope to extend this perspective by considering how relations between gender and technology can also play a powerful role in the re-making of racialized social class divisions. In particular, I will focus on the role of technology, and especially video

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