The E-Girl Work Machine as the Body-for-Others

Marxist feminist scholar Silvia Federeci argues that “one of capitalism’s main projects has been the transformation of our bodies into work machines” (10). In other words, the accumulation of capital requires human labor and thus our minds and bodies are shaped in order to maximize productivity and profit. The advent of the Internet has given rise to a whole host of new work machines, unlike any other before. Today, I would like to examine the e-girl work machine. 

The simple definition of “e-girl” is “electronic girl,” but the term has a negative connotation. Typically, it is deployed as an insult against women in male-dominated, online spaces, with the underlying suggestion that they exist in those spaces to harvest male attention for money, favors, or popularity. Any woman, regardless of her behavior or intentions, is liable to be labeled an e-girl if she dares to exist in Internet spaces. 

I stream for a living on the male-dominated platform, Twitch, which—whether I wish it or not—has granted me the title of e-girl. It is the easiest job I have ever had. I talk to strangers and play video games for a few hours every night. My time is my own, so I have the freedom to work on my own projects and build towards a career I would actually like. E-girling has saved me from the monotony of the office 9-5 and the brutality of minimum wage. Though my profession may not be particularly grueling, the e-girl work machine may yet be worth exploring. How does one transform a human being into an e-girl work machine? 

To answer this question, we must first consider how one makes money on Twitch. A streamer’s income primarily comes from three places: ad revenue, straight from the pockets of viewers in the form of bits, subscriptions, and/or Paypal donations, and sponsorships. For the sake of this article, I will be focusing on the first two. Regardless of how a streamer feels about it, Twitch will play approximately three minutes of advertisements per hour for viewers that do not have a subscription to the streamer they are watching; streamers have the option to schedule these advertisements. The more viewers a streamer has, the more ad revenue they receive; i.e., it is in a streamer’s best interest to incur as many concurrent viewers as possible. Subscriptions, bits, and PayPal donations are a bit more capricious because they rely on the whims of the viewers. A streamer can simply hope viewers will be generous enough to gift or they can set explicit goals that encourage viewers to donate in some capacity—for instance, a streamer might promise to play a certain game or wear a cosplay if they receive a specific number of subscriptions. 

On a platform in which the demographic is predominantly cisgender, heterosexual, and male, the ability to portray oneself as a conventionally attractive, gender conforming, cisgender woman has many advantages in the acquisition of capital. Research indicates that the success of a female streamer is primarily predicated upon how physically attractive she is (Uszkoreit 166). An enticing thumbnail will increase a streamer’s ad revenue as viewers are more likely to click on the stream and, if they like the content, donate to the streamer. The ideal e-girl work machine is, first and foremost, a beautiful woman—or at least capable of masquerading as one. 

This prerequisite presented a conundrum for me when I first entertained the idea of streaming as a job rather than a hobby. I was not a woman and had not been a woman for a decade. (And even when I was a woman, I was very, very bad at it, as my peers often reminded me.)

I will explain this as simply as possible, without gratuitous personal detail: I was assigned female at birth (i.e., I was born with a vulva and uterus). At age 15, I decided I did not want to be a girl anymore; I cut my hair off, donned men’s clothing, changed my name to Charlie, and insisted on they/them or he/him pronouns. I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at age 16 and, at age 19, prescribed testosterone (which I had to discontinue after a few months due to mood disturbances.) In private and public, I assumed an explicitly non-female identity until I was 25 years old. While I did not experience life as a cisgender male and could only rarely pass as one, I was exempt from much of the trouble young women deal with. Heterosexual men hardly ever bothered me; it is only the deeply insecure male that finds my kind—the in-betweens that aspire to manhood—threatening. I was either ignored or begrudgingly treated with a respect I have since lost. I was fully a subject. I had little sense of danger and could comfortably walk through the most dangerous San Francisco neighborhoods at night by myself. Gender dysphoria was a pain, but I was spared the crippling body dysmorphia that many young women endure. 

I had no idea how to be a woman, but it seemed a small price to pay to never have to wake up at six in the morning ever again. And so, the transformation to e-girl work machine began; I grew out my hair, learned how to do makeup, and, through trial and error, figured out what women’s clothing worked best for my build. It wasn’t so bad, at first. Even a bit fun—to be an e-girl felt like doing drag, donning absurd, feminine frippery to perform in front of a camera. E-girl drag helped establish a boundary between my stream persona and my private self. 

But to be a work machine is not a temporary state; it is etched into our very being. Survival under capitalism necessitates we exist permanently as work machines. And so the e-girl work machine—commodified womanhood—took shape in me, manifesting in my brain and body as the feminine neuroses that had plagued me before I scorned my assigned sex. Because the e-girl work machine is, when all is said and done, a body-for-others. In his book, Masculine Domination, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu explains:

Everything in the genesis of the female habitus and in the social condition of its actualization combines to make the female experience of the body the limiting case of the universal experience of the body-for-others, constantly exposed to the objectification performed by the gaze and the discord of others. (66) 

To be an object that is gazed at—“a thing that is made to be looked at or which one has to look at in order to prepare it to be looked at” (68)—is an uncomfortable experience in the real world, but it is magnified, not lessened through the camera lens. While streaming, I am forced to look at myself far more frequently than I would like to. I must constantly evaluate myself as an object and try to see myself as an object through the eyes of others. Is my makeup smudged? Are my eye bags too prominent? Am I showing too much or too little cleavage? Does my waist look tiny today? The awareness that I am being looked at and judged like so much meat is ever-present and consuming, for I know that my income relies on appeasing the gaze and that any failure to do so will be remarked upon. Bourdieu posits that women’s clothing “has the effect of not only masking the body, but of continuously calling it to order” (28). The clothing I wear limits my movement to avoid any accidental slippage, forcing me to abandon the masculine body language I had once studied and adopted. It is often tight and uncomfortable, pressing into my skin and reminding me incessantly of my flesh and the need to hold myself taut, tucked in, lest I relax and run the risk of looking unattractive. My body aches after stream, exhausted from the rigor of being called to order. 

It does not help that harassment from male chatters is a daily occurrence. Whether it is objectifying language, the unwanted sharing of sexual fantasies, cruel comments about my body, or threats of sexual violence, an obnoxiously loud portion of male Twitch chatters are intent on reminding me that I am an object. Anything that reminds this particular breed of man that I am not flesh, that I am mind too, is a threat. Before I began streaming on Twitch, I rarely ever had my intelligence questioned by men; my father, an internal medicine doctor, encouraged me from a young age to share my opinions on all matters cultural and political with him. Despite our differences in age, gender and education, he would always engage with me as an intellectual equal. In both my undergraduate and postgraduate programs, male peers and professors took me seriously and listened to me. 

Not so online—it is only through the medium of Twitch streaming that I have been exposed to so many ignorant, uneducated men that seem certain of their intellectual superiority over me. I used to feel comfortable being wrong, to admit I did not know something. But the knowledge that a man may see me stumble once and then fancy himself my better makes navigating conversations about anything academic a minefield. I would do anything to avoid becoming flesh and only flesh, my cerebral nature denied me. 

This new awareness of my body has had some negative impacts on my psyche; the relatively normal level of body dysmorphia I had before I began is now overwhelming. I am possessive of my image, uncomfortable with taking photos of myself and being photographed. I am filled with an animal panic when I know that the form I take in the minds of others is out of my control. Feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir describes the experience of womanhood as the sense that woman is “doubled; instead of coinciding within herself, here she is existing outside of herself” (349); I do not walk the world in my body, I watch myself walk through the world as a body. I have become a neurotic narcissist, thinking constantly of my appearance. I cannot even derive pleasure from this alienated flesh; understanding my body-for-others as a commodity, reduced to a carnal state, the erotic has wilted in me. The irony of becoming a body is that I have no desire to indulge in it. 

I do not wish to exaggerate my difficulties here. As previously stated, this is the easiest job I have ever had and I do enjoy specific aspects of streaming, specifically the freedom and the control. And indeed, much of what bothers me about streaming is a product of my unique gendered circumstances. The harassment I face really only amounts to the death throes of traditional patriarchy—the squalling men that inflict their online presence upon me feel unmanned and powerless before women and other gendered minorities profiting off of our own objectification, all the while refusing to entertain their fantasies of cerebral superiority.

Really, it’s a privileged position. I am my own prized pig.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination. Stanford University Press, 2001.

De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Random House, 2010.

Federici, Silvia. Beyond the Periphery of the Skin: Rethinking, Remaking, and Reclaiming the Body in Contemporary Capitalism. PM Press, 2020.

Uszkoreit, Lena. “With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Video Game Live Streaming and Its Potential Risks and Benefits for Female Gamers.” Feminism in Play. Palgrave MacMillan, 2018.