Esports and masculinized infrastructures: gendered infrastructures of performance, health and professionalism in organized gaming

This article analyses esports as a rapidly expanding and institutionalising organisational field situated between digital media and technology-mediated work. Despite its rapid growth, esports struggle to establish itself as an inclusive practice and often reproduces exclusionary models and structures typical of traditional sport. Athletes’ bodies, gaming technologies, digital infrastructures, metrics and time regimes co-produce what is recognised as performance, health and professionalism, as well as what is marginalised or excluded. The issue of gender is particularly significant, as the sector continues to be shaped by masculinised forces that structure participation and legitimacy. The article proposes a feminist theoretical repositioning to investigate gender in esports. Gender is not treated as an individual attribute or as a matter of representation quality or cultural toxicity, but as an immanent organisational principle that takes shape within the material infrastructures of performance. In this perspective, masculinity operates as a largely invisible organisational regime that becomes most visible in moments of friction or failure, when some bodies struggle to align with normative expectations of continuity, control, availability and endurance. The study adopts a qualitative interpretative design based on exemplary case studies and analyses organisational and media artefacts such as regulations, documentaries, official communications, digital archives and performance metrics to reconstruct infrastructural configurations that shape how inclusion, failure, health and professionalism are materially produced and imposed to non-normative bodies.