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This article looks at two forms of online self-broadcasting: webcam modeling and video game live streaming. Though these practices have much in common, the parallels between them have gone largely unacknowledged, in part because the discriminatory cultures surrounding video games have rendered connections between streaming and sex work unspeakable. Drawing from an analysis of “tips and tricks” YouTube videos created by women webcam models and men live streamers, this research maps the relationship between camming and streaming as forms of labor. It illustrates the many overlaps between the two practices, challenging notions that camming is inferior to or even separate from streaming.

This article serves as the guest editors’ introduction to the Television and New Media special issue dedicated to gender and sexuality in live streaming. Live streaming is a key part of the contemporary digital media landscape; it sits at the center of wide-reaching shifts in how culture, entertainment, and labor are expressed and experienced online today. Gender and sexuality are crucial elements of live streaming. Across live streaming’s many forms, these elements manifest in myriad ways: from gendered performances to gender-based harassment, from LGBTQ community building to real-time sex work. This special issue models an interdisciplinary approach to studying gender and sexuality in live streaming, featuring scholarship from the humanities, social sciences, and human-computer interaction. It also serves as an impassioned call to those who study technological tools and platforms like live streaming to pay attention to the crucial roles that identity, power, embodiment, and intimacy play in these technologies. There can be no full cultural understanding of live streaming that does not address its entanglements with sexuality and gender.

This article offers a queer reading of Brent Watanabe’s 2016 video game–based art piece San Andreas Deer Cam, a mod of Grand Theft Auto V in which a computer-controlled deer wanders the game’s extensive open world. During the time that San Andreas Deer Cam was streamed live on Twitch, it became something of an internet sensation, drawing attention for its comedic elements and the deer’s seeming invisibility. I argue here that Watanabe’s piece can read in an alternative way: as a work of queer posthumanism. Drawing from game studies scholars whose research explores the non-human (such as Alenda Chang and Paolo Ruffino), as well as queer studies scholars who have theorized how posthumanism challenges norms of gender, sexuality, and intimacy (such as Dana Luciano and Mel Chen), I analyze video recordings of San Andreas Deer Cam. Through these videos, I articulate the piece’s posthumanist elements, with a focus on the implications of Watanabe’s choice to make the game unplayable and the powerful yet ambivalent picture the piece offers of queerness ‘beyond the human’. In San Andreas Deer Cam, queerness manifests in many forms, all of them wrapped up with the messy divide between peoples, animals, and machines: the visual erotics of the deer sensuously rendered backside, moments of sexual misrecognition as non-player characters appear to catcall the deer, even a prolonged scene in which the deer becomes the object of homophobic violence. Ultimately, I conclude, San Andreas Deer Cam offers a model for how video games themselves can be used to rethink the centrality of human agency, which has long been considered the defining feature of the medium. Watanabe’s piece serves as a provocation to consider the queer potential of games that are unplayable and of refusing – rather than doggedly pursuing – the supposed capacity of video games to place human players in control.

This article addresses the seeming absence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in video games from the 1980s and 1990s, the height of the US AIDS crisis. As Adrienne Shaw and Christopher Persaud have noted, stories about HIV/AIDS were pervasive across American popular media during this period, which also represented a boom in video game development. However, documentation remains of only a handful of early video games that mention HIV/AIDS. This article argues that, far from being absent from video game history, HIV/AIDS and the US AIDS crisis were actually influential in shaping a number of the design elements and narrative genres that have become important to contemporary video games. Scholars like Cait McKinney have demonstrated how people living with HIV/AIDS in America played a crucial part in the evolution of internet technologies that now form the backbone of video games. Through a comparative reading of two games by C. M. Ralph, Caper in the Castro (1989) and Murder on Main Street (1989), this article demonstrates how HIV/AIDS has also manifested in the content and form of video games, even (and perhaps especially) when it seems absent. Derritt Mason has explained how Caper in the Castro, widely celebrated as the first LGBTQ video game, contains clear echoes of the AIDS crisis. Yet, as this article demonstrates, HIV/AIDS remains a powerful presence even in Murder on Main Street, Ralph’s “straight version” of the game. Together, these games offer a microcosm through which to explore larger tensions between HIV/AIDS and video games, with the AIDS crisis representing a key element of what Cody Mejeur has termed the “present absence of queerness in video games.”

Investigating and reimagining the origin story of the sex doll through the tale of the sailor's dames de voyage. The sex doll and its high-tech counterpart the sex robot have gone mainstream, as both the object of consumer desire and the subject of academic study. But sex dolls, and sexual technology in general, are nothing new. Sex dolls have been around for centuries. In Sex Dolls at Sea, Bo Ruberg explores the origin story of the sex doll, investigating its cultural implications and considering who has been marginalized and who has been privileged in the narrative. Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll. The earliest commercial sex dolls were not the dames de voyage but the femmes en caoutchouc: “women” made of inflatable vulcanized rubber, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Interrogating the sailor sex doll origin story, Ruberg finds beneath the surface a web of issues relating to gender, sexuality, race, and colonialism. What has been lost in the history of the sex doll and other sex tech, Ruberg tells us, are the stories of the sex workers, women, queer people, and people of color whose lives have been bound up with these technologies.