Women's inclusion and neoliberal governmentality in the Swedish digital game industry: An analysis of discursive positions and recruitment strategies

Abstract

Many companies within the creative industries present themselves as open and egalitarian while they are, at the same time, marked by vertical and horizontal sex-segregation. The paper illustrates how this is particularly salient in the digital games industry and further examines how the presence of a neoliberal postfeminist discourse contributes to the neglectance of structured inequality. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with actors in the Swedish games industry. Drawing on the theoretical perception that neoliberal logic reframes contemporary notions of gender and equality through a postfeminist discursive framework, this paper identifies and critically discusses different approaches to understand and tackle the gender divide in the Swedish games industry. While postfeminism has been characterized as apolitical or even anti-feminist, this paper discusses how such postfeminist expressions could also be understood as connecting to the feminist project of de-gendering. By way of conclusion, this study shows how a postfeminist discourse obscures the reality of gendered inequalities and poses limits to organizational change.