"This Industry Has Ruined Me": Categorizing the Experiences of Brazilian Feminist Gaming Streamers Through an Intersectional Approach

This study examines how Brazilian women who stream video games and openly identify as feminists experience their work, and how they navigate the tension between activism and audience growth. Drawing on narrative interviews with seven streamers aged 20 to 45, whose followings ranged from about 100 to 50,000, the research produced six hours of recordings and 140 pages of transcripts. These were coded into topics such as professional insertion, self-image pressure, emotional labor, safety, communication strategies, community dynamics, and relations with brands and female colleagues, then analyzed through framing analysis and two intersectional frameworks.

The findings show that most of the difficulties the streamers describe are concentrated in the interpersonal domain of power, meaning lived individual experience, even though many stem from structural conditions of the industry. Although the participants described gaming as their dream profession, they reported widespread discrimination against women and minority groups within the gamer audience, insufficient platform protection against harassment, and algorithmic and metric systems that tend to favor content aligned with the status quo. Feelings of loneliness, self-comparison, exhaustion, and the emotional burden of managing these vulnerabilities recur across narratives, with one participant summarizing the toll by stating that the industry had "ruined" her.

In response to these pressures, the streamers commonly adopt a didactic, non-confrontational approach when discussing feminism, reasoning that it reduces exposure to cyberbullying and mass reporting. The author also observes that feminist-oriented cause marketing appears less attractive to brands than it was previously. The study acknowledges its limits as a small, locally situated project, yet proposes its categorization scheme as a foundation for future research on female content creators, feminism, and gaming audiences in the Global South.