Never give up, never surrender: Game live streaming, neoliberal work, and personalized media economies

Based on Internet Ethnography of a popular female live streamer on YouTube Gaming, this article theorizes how game live streaming invokes new forms of paid emotional labor that intersect with traditionally feminized demands of unpaid attentive and caring work. Drawing from an intersectional feminist framework that takes seriously small data and everyday life, this article suggests there is a shift toward one’s work being part of a personalized media economy that can relate to one’s audience. This study concludes with an invitation to think how folks under neoliberal capitalism are willing to leave secure, traditional 9-to-5 jobs, in order to be a professional gamer without any social safety nets and ultimately be always-on-the-clock.