Lumpen, hypermasculinity and the middle class: the case of Bioshock Infinite and Watch Dogs
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The video game has been studied as an ideological artifact with the capacity to influence social and political imaginaries that has historically maintained a discourse of neoliberal values and has been constituted as a masculinised space with a clear hegemonic male subject, young and middle class, that has set the tone of narratives and discourses in the media. One of the consequences of this process has been the masculinisation of the protagonists of the medium and, as has been subsequently studied, after the impact of different social crisis, that these characters were representatives of the middle class. But is this always the case? This paper aims to study, through two cases selected from among the most popular titles of the past decade how this discourse is not necessarily conveyed necessarily through middle-class characters, but rather through the figure of the social outcast, more specifically the lumpen. And how the combination of this figure alongside the standard of hyper-masculinity that regulates the medium enables the characters into powerful vehicles for the neo-liberal discourse that, despite its crisis, still has no rival to its hegemony in society.
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(c) Pablo Romero Medina, 2024
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Pablo Romero Medina, Universidad de Granada
Pablo Romero-Medina (Málaga, 1996) PhD student at the University of Granada (UGR). Substitute Professor of Political Science at the University of Salamanca. He is currently working on a doctoral thesis in Political Science on alt right and video games at the University of Granada. Specialised in political theory, his interests are focused on studying the functioning of political imaginaries and the extreme right both in videogames and in the digital space. He also publishes on issues of AI and its possible effects and risks on current models of democracy in specialised journals such as Filco, as well as scientific publications on the relationship between dystopias and political apathy
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