back on stream this semester, kicking it off with the game that lets me live out all my fine motor skill dreams 🪡👗
friday 15:00 CEST @ twitch.tv/streamingthepast
keerthi sridharan🌻🇵🇸
@copperkeerthi.bsky.social
248 followers 115 following 75 posts
they | phd @ leiden | hacker-bard | forever gm, habitual gamer, biweekly artiste keerthisridharan.com
![ABSTRACT
This paper considers Twitch’s 2021 “Hot Tub Meta” as a case study on how gendered public performances are regulated within game-centric platform cultures. Drawing on Zoe Sofia’s [Sofia, Z. (2000). Container Ttchnologies. Hypatia, 15(2), 181-201. https://doi.org/10.1353/hyp.2000.0029] concept of “container technologies,” I argue that Twitch’s institutional response to the Hot Tub Meta reveals how gendered place-making and embodiment are managed through a containment strategy that disciplines emerging non-digital gaming leisure genres in relation to the platform’s core gaming activities. I contribute to ongoing debates in Twitch Studies by examining how platform governance operates through discursive and infrastructural mechanisms to regulate bodies, spaces, and behaviors. Methodologically, I conduct a cultural text analysis of Twitch’s Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, Transparency Reports, and official blog posts, treating these documents as cultural texts that define the limits of propriety, play, and platform legibility. Supplemented by popular media coverage, this analysis situates the controversy around bath- and bedroom-based streaming within Twitch’s broader moderation framework. I conclude by examining how alternative approaches to platformed play, understood as a site of governance, can reshape debates about legitimacy. Such approaches move beyond the normative boundaries that currently determine which forms of play and cultural production are sanctioned within livestreaming cultures.
KEYWORDS:
Twitch, livestreaming, game studies, platforms, governance](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vthxrtkws6i4m5euwzz3wnyw/bafkreigugk6jfireyyzgqqkwhyileh5oimgh2vtkplrrytzqgmq5epdfkq)
