Pink-Collar Playbour: The Digital Housework of Video Game Livestreaming

This doctoral research proposal by Christine H. Tran examines the domestic labor of gendered and racialized Twitch streamers in North America, situating livestreaming as a form of remote, platformized cultural production that extends the marginalization of women and people of color in gaming culture into the home. Drawing on digital ethnography, platform studies, and institutional discourse analysis, the project treats Twitch as a case study in how platformization reshapes cultural work, with particular attention to how the boundaries between private and public, physical and virtual labor become blurred for streamers whose broadcasts originate from their living spaces.

The theoretical framework combines Marxist feminist social reproduction theory with scholarship on immaterial and affective labor, including the figure of the "digital housewife," to argue that streamers' work draws on unpaid, feminized domestic labor that has long underpinned precarious careers in the games industry. The proposal also situates the rise of home-based streaming within the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people shifted to remote work and streamers' established practices of working from home became widely visible. Harassment and stalking patterns from game streaming cultures, including "Zoom bombing," are presented as evidence that these risks extend into intimate domestic settings.

The methodology employs "patchwork ethnography," a flexible approach suited to fragmented, short-term field engagement. It draws on twelve semi-structured Zoom interviews, several including virtual home tours, twelve one-hour participant observation sessions of public broadcasts, and an institutional analysis of Twitch and Amazon's relationships with streamers and audiences. The sample of twelve participants spans diverse genres and includes six racialized participants, reflecting the predominantly white and male composition of the platform. The proposal also reports progress, with one peer-reviewed article published and a second forthcoming, and outlines goals for the PhD Consortium related to collaboration and academic job market preparation.