‘I Won’t Let Her in my Room’: Sibling Strategies of Power and Resistance around Computer and Video Games

Abstract

This chapter examines issues of power and resistance around the ownership and use of computer and video games in domestic space. In particular I want to discuss the way in which domestic space has become contested space when both boys and girls are using the home as a leisure site. Domestic space has been considered the province of girls and women. From the adolescent ‘bedroom culture’ to the housewife watching soaps, women’s leisure has traditionally been seen as taking place within the home. However, my work is beginning to show that the leisure of boys and young men is increasingly based around the home rather than out on the streets and, more particularly, is located in the bedroom and around the computer (see also Wheelock, 1992). The question arises, therefore, what happens to those whose space that traditionally is? How does this shift in the siting of boys’ leisure affect the traditional site of girls’ leisure? An examination of the activities and regulation of children and young people in domestic space has been missing from the literature around the sociology of the family, the sociology of leisure, and from studies of childhood and youth. Such work is useful when looking at what McRobbie (1994) has called the ‘dignity of the specific’ — that is to say, the micropractices of power in everyday life.

Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power.

(Foucault, in Rabinow, 1984: 252)