Stream(Age) Queens: Zoom-Bombs, Glitter Bombs & Other Doctoral Fairy Tales
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Communication, Culture and Critique ISSN 1753–9129
FORUM
Stream(Age) Queens: Zoom-Bombs, Glitter
Bombs & Other Doctoral Fairy Tales
Christine H. Tran*
Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G6, Canada
Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/ccc/article/14/2/356/6224211 by guest on 11 August 2021
doi:10.1093/ccc/tcab028
I.
Swiping over screenshots of my first Zoom-bomb, I regret my lipstick choices. My
Joker mouth sets off the comedic golds and oranges of my background. Engulfed in
flames of someone else’s design, the backdrop is from KC Green’s webcomic “On
Fire” (better known by GIF Keyboard users as the “It’s Fine” dog). As I e-introduce
our panelists, it’s just fellow graduate students, myself and my scarlet mouth until
somebody in the throes of a solo sex act penetrates my peripheral vision.
The video looks homemade. I do not recognize the screenname. I think (and
hope to this day) the hands belonged to nobody from our graduate college. With
my host(ess) powers, I eject them from the room with a clumsy mouse swipe. I’m
about to apologize for the audience—I’m not sure why I should—but more come.
Lengthy usernames flood the room. Some avatars are characters from Among Us,
that multiplayer game which ascended to one of the informal “town squares” of the
global pandemic alongside Clubhouse and Zoom. (If you have an “Invaders” joke,
I’ve heard it. Thanks.) I never register this as a “Zoom bomb” (straight from the
headlines!) until a prepubescent voice rises among the racial slurs and music to
shout, “Christine, you’re hot!”
As virtual catcallers, Zoom bombers reproduce along the fraternal lines. When I
recount the bomb to my colleagues, I dance around this gendered register.
Jocularly, I quip how I succumbed to the same fatal flaw as Rumpelstiltskin. In that
fable, the eponymous trickster foils his own child-snatching plans by being loose
with passcodes. By the campfire, he sings his (user)name into the ears of an eaves-
dropping scout, who passes it onto the queen. With his info, the ex-farmgirl utters
his name and nullifies their years-old gold-for-girls contract. In some versions,
Rumpelstiltskin gets so furious, he stomps his foot into the ground, and it opens
hole into Hell. He falls through, taking with him the queen’s past and letting her
live tenured ever after as royalty.
*Corresponding author: Christine H. Tran; e-mail: christine.tran@mail.utoronto.ca
356 Communication, Culture and Critique 14 (2021) 356–360 V C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press
on behalf of International Communication Association. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
C. H. Tran Stream(Age) Queens
I danced around no campfires, but I carelessly released the password onto a
Listserv and did not use Zoom’s “waiting room” to screen guests. I am not in hell,
but I still Zoom several times a week from that same desk. Whenever I try to retell
my story of surviving the bomb, I try to resist the trite fires of self-victimization. I
look back to the screenshots, as if answers lay in the flames or my make-up. What
gendered infrastructures led me to blame my own big, red mouth?
II.
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In the theatre of Zoom U, news stories painted Zoom bombers as “trolls” and “alt-
right tricksters.” These characterization invites comparisons to prank-callers, or
those who sic SWAT teams onto game streamers. I take problematic laughter in
these events as annoyances rather than long-running antagonists to people’s sur-
vival in public. I laugh until I recall that “SWAT”ing has sent humans to (racialized)
deaths at the end of police gunfire. There is precedence in targeting academic domi-
ciles as digital siege points. We may also see Zoom bombers as the media grandsons
of #GamerGate, the 2015 hashtag harassment event that doxed women journalists
and academics for daring to critique games as feminists. As COVID-19 protocols
transform scholarly events into new media housework, such gendered histories of
harassment have synchronized into our present.
Bombs did not become the dominant lore of Zoom University. When class-
rooms and offices went remote in early 2020, headlines leapt to frame the relocated
teleworkers of North America as techno-creative innovators-come-performers: a
new breed of “streamer” for the post-watercooler workforce. New York University’s
Professor Robert Yang made waves for lecturing on Twitch to his 18-student class
(Farokhmanesh, 2020). Tellingly, Wired published a piece—by and about a male
freelancer—headlined, “We are all livestreamers now, and Zoom is our stage”
(Ford, 2021).
Did we “all” become livestreamers? Ask a grocery store clerk or personal sup-
port worker. Ursula Huws (1991) cautions how imaginations of the “electronic cot-
tage” worker will reproduce him in male and middle-class glory. Mantras like “We
are all livestreamers” perform a similar rhetorical work. As the industry (folk)lore
on Zoom workers is still a work-in-progress, we risk downplaying the divisions of
embodied labor—by different bodies—it takes to make a stream “happen” over a se-
ries of moments.
Not unlike a fairy tale, Zoom streaming deals in gendered risk. My friend had
her first Zoom-Bombing during a panel on early-modern ladies; a screeching cho-
rus of boys assaulted their airwaves whenever a presenter tried to speak. An online
query of “Zoom bombed thesis” likewise suggests a disproportionate number of ra-
cialized and gendered scholars were targeted for attacks, which frequently
entailed—like my call—racial slurs and the overtaking of screens with sexual imag-
ery. PhD students receive unmagically little instruction on managing this precarious
publicity.
Communication, Culture and Critique 14 (2021) 356–360 357Stream(Age) Queens C. H. Tran
Before we hinge these risks on the “feminization of work,” Donna Haraway
(1991) reminds us how phrases like this or “homework economy” shackle our imag-
ination of the “feminine” to ready-made-vulnerability. We risk reproducing an idea
that elliptical schedules and insecurities that were “supposed” to be felt only by
women, even as they spread amongst “normal” workers. Does an alternative narra-
tive exist for streamers who have been doing this before the pandemic?
Reading the role of domestic space on Twitch streams, Ruberg and Lark (2020)
posit that livestreamers are always already em-“BED”-ded:
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The practice of streaming from the bedrooms lays plain the invitation to inti-
macy and access that is inherent in all livestreaming. After all, the basic fact of
streaming implies an intimate invitation: entry, via webcam and direct address,
into the private space and thoughts of the streamer. Looking to the bedroom as
a site of performance (. . .) reminds us that all livestreaming, wherever it takes
place, is an intimate, embodied, gendered, and arguably erotic business that of-
ten literally takes place in the home. Put in spatial terms, all streaming is
streaming from the bedroom. (p. 13)
Is all Zoom teaching, too, done from the bedroom? Like the word “homework”
referring to no specific “home,” the “bed” in “bedroom” denotes no literal bed.
Rather, to stream yourself online gives an illegible audience permission to read you.
This intimate gesture grafts instructors to all the libidinal/reproductive associations
of “beds.”
My bed was 20 feet away from my qualifying exams defense. It is also five feet
from my breakfast nook (which is what I call my sofa). My office desk is my dinner
table, my game station, and my vanity table. This is the figurative and literal seat of
my beauty, my bounty (teaching, grant-writing) and my bombing (Not of my
exams! I passed!). When I choose a funny Zoom background, I’m not planning an
alt-ac career in comedy. Backgrounds wave a magic wand over the backstage of
PhD stipend-funded space and unwashed clothes, which are beyond my job de-
scription to share.
III.
Between the bombs and breakdowns, would I surrender the “magic” of synchronous
PhD(ing)? Zoom has also enlivened forms of research creation not possible in-per-
son. Months after I screenshot Figure 1, my same graduate student group hosted an
electronic “Coffee House,” where we showcased non-academic talents and “co-
authored” projects. Like this one:
In this “Reverse Beauty Tutorial,” I used Zoom polling to invert the structure of
beauty/academic instruction: audiences voted on/instructed me how to apply my
make-up, not vice-versa. For 48 hours after the experience documented in Figure 2,
I found chunks of sparkle in my hair and keyboard. Moon-shaped gemstones hang
off my chin (winning the poll by 69%!), and a three-way second place tie between
358 Communication, Culture and Critique 14 (2021) 356–360C. H. Tran Stream(Age) Queens
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Figure 1 Cropped screenshot of a Southeast Asian femme in a Zoom window. Their
background features flames from KC’s Green’s webcomic, “On Fire."
Figure 2 A Southeast Asian femme with obscene shapes and glitter on their face takes a
selfie before a computer screen. The screen features a brightened-out Zoom room.
Communication, Culture and Critique 14 (2021) 356–360 359Stream(Age) Queens C. H. Tran
green, black, and purple shadow blends upon my right eyelid. The red mouth that
hung agape in last year’s bomb was redrawn above my lip.
I quip to pollsters, “My face is your CV line!” With 20þ co-authors, our (in)for-
mal citation was “Tran et al. (2021). Gamified cosmetology in the synchronous
academy: What Zoom polls & a vengeful audience will do to a MF.” The abstract:
“Operating from disciplines from astrophysics to robotics, 20þ co-authors inject
their interdisciplinary agency into Christine’s pores. Unlike a ‘Zoom Bomb,’ this
glitter bomb is democratically dropped with consent.”
Zoom melted the firewalls between myself and my PhD. Studying livestreamed
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harassment in “theory,” you begin to treat digital transgression like my virtual back-
ground of Figure 1: a flaming caricature of risk. You can chuckle until it burns.
I look over my shoulder. No flames or solutions. Just my bedroom door. As
Huws (1991) warns, technological imaginaries like the “e-cottage” or “Zoom U” are
not predictive devices. They only reflect our present anxieties and aspirations. As
webcams still feast upon our private infernos, how long precarious workers be
tasked to write and fight as guests inside our own waiting rooms?
References
Farokhmanesh, M. (2020, March 12). Teaching on Twitch was a “mild disaster” for one
games professor. The Verge. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/12/
21175414/robert-yang-twitch-stream-nyu-classes-coronavirus-games-professor
Haraway, D. (2006). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the
late twentieth century. In J. Weiss, J. Nolan, J. Hunsinger, & P. Trifonas (Eds.), The
International Journal of Virtual Learning Environments (pp. 117–158). Dordrecht:
Springer Netherlands.
Huws, U. (1991). Telework: Projections. Futures, 23(1), 19–31.
Ruberg, B., & Lark, D. (2020). Livestreaming from the bedroom: Performing intimacy
through domestic space on Twitch. Convergence, first published online 1–17. doi:
10.1177/15554120211005239
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