A new special issue of the Gamevironments journal on ‘Beyond Play’ was recently published and in it we find a contribution by UU PhD candidate Weijie Huang together with Payal Arora and Maya Yerkes.

Here’s the abstract for their article, titled “Belongingness and Resistance in Platformed Play: Feminist Agency among Female Gamers in China”:

This study investigates how Chinese female gamers navigate persistent gendered inequalities within a deeply mediatized digital environment shaped by platform governance, algorithmic and local patriarchal structures. Addressing the Western-centric focus of existing scholarship, it integrates belongingness theory with feminist perspectives to conceptualize belongingness as a cultural–political practice under constraints. Using qualitative netnography, the study analyses 343 multimodal posts from Chinese platforms Douban, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili. Findings show that female gamers mobilize adaptive feminist agency by employing strategies, including decoding discrimination through humor and aesthetic critique, engaging in everyday digital activism, and reshaping gaming authority through emotional ties and value renegotiation. By examining Chinese cases, this study extends belongingness theory to geopolitical dimensions, providing a context-sensitive perspective on the agency of marginalized groups in a deeply mediatized society. Rather than being specific to gaming environments, these practices demonstrate how belongingness operates as a broader feminist agency across platformed cultures. This study identifies the infrastructural and relational conditions of feminist agency, offering concrete insights for gender-inclusive platform governance through play and feminist media studies.

The full article can be found on the Gamevironments journal website.

The article is part of Weijie Huang‘s larger PhD project in which she is interested in how women participate in and negotiate algorithmically organised digital gaming environments. Rather than looking at women players primarily as users affected by algorithmically systems, the focus is on how they interpret, negotiate, and sometimes reshape the conditions of participation through everyday practices, relationships, and collective knowledge. As such, the the project is interested in questions of belonging, agency, participation, and how algorithmic gaming environments become socially workable. The article’s co-authors Payal Arora and Mara Yerkers also act as supervisors of the project. Payal Arora is Professor and Chair in Inclusive AI Cultures at Utrecht University and Founder of the Inclusive AI Lab. Mara A. Yerkes is Full Professor of Comparative Social Policy in relation to Social Inequalities at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science.