Hegemonic Derivation of Gender Superiority
The combination of production ‘worth’ and production ‘relation’ (social value) is solely responsible for generating a rift in human civilization. The ideology of male primacy (all the action potential of male value) is erected around a logos where human stomata is bifurcated between dominance and oppressed. The consequent ‘sex category’ (biological value of a subject) also identifies the homo-sapiens with a phallus (biological and symbolical), and expects the dominant race to abide by it. The negation of ‘abide’ is what gives birth to the ‘oppressed’ one – serving as an (inferior)antithesis to the predominant fraction of human(s). They are associated with no social value; yet is important to provide epistemological justification for the phalo-logo-centrism. The paradox appears when a ‘subject’ (belonging from either the dominant lineage or from the oppressed one) deviates from the provided binary norms and operates in a non-traditional way. “This insight is particularly significant for research on language and gender, much of which has sought to describe the linguistic means by which men dominate women in interaction (Tannen, 1994, pp. 20-21). Put another way, it is discourse, the interpersonal communication – which is dominating not only the male or female (biological) but also the male or female trait (ideological performativity) as a whole. Similarly, the problematization occurs when one cannot trace the ‘semantic space’ (in which all forms of hegemonic creolization epitomizes) of discursive dominance. Therefore the connection between a malleable dynamic concept of ideological hegemony (imaginary) and its physical performance happens on the contextual space of metaphoric associations – where a subject learn to associate a signifier with a hegemonic signified by granting knowledge from the existent performing subjects (either acting out the dominant one or the oppressed one).
If this is what has dominated the evolution of homo-sapiens (physical existence) and their constructivism of gendered worldview, then with the rise of information communication and media, a new space had announced itself – the space of binary algorithms. Swaying away from traditional restrictions of creation (where temporal and spatial axis are constant), they were offering a fluid existence – free from gender discrimination. The domain of the web, with its plethora of signification (where the sign value is not a static entity, rather it is a fluid, dynamic one) was characterized by neutral language use and appropriate contextual formulations. However, this space gradually became dominated by two contrasting discourses, “a feminine discourse encompassing a more ‘personal’ style of communication, characterized by apologetic language use…and the masculine discourse, typified by being more ‘authoritative’ and characterized by argumentative language use” (Proefschrift, 2009, p. 15). When these two discourses collide – quite naturally (as it is always customarily bound to happen) the male one prevails.
The same pattern is visible with traditional video gaming. What happens in this communicative space is the formation of a tension that pulsates on the bipolar association of game graphics and parallel phonetic association. The consequent performativity re-establishes the male player’s phobia of toying with gender performativity with hetero-normative spaces – which portrays the act of ‘masculinity’ as normalcy. As Schmieder (2009) has observed:
At first glance, sex seems to play an oppressive role…immediately when chosing their characters, players have to decide whether they want to play a male or a female character…male characters are bigger and more strongly built, especially around the torso – whereas female characters are more delicate and show articulate breast curves (p. 8).