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CCSN
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Content Creator Scholars Network (CCSN) 🤳🏽✨ An interdisciplinary community for humanistic + qualitative studies of digital creators and emerging platform economies and cultures. Join us!
![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)
