ABSTRACT
This chapter theorizes the gaming body in ways that do not continue the gendered rhetoric of celebrating action to the detriment of the immobile body as videogame theory and new media theories can do. It presents the gaming body in ways that do not celebrate action to the detriment of place as symbolic interactionism or phenomenological geography can do. The chapter presents lived gaming bodies, which may want to act and game, but which do not or cannot always act or game in intended or transparent ways. Valerie Walkerdine's conception of gaming is partly facilitated through her focus on gaming as management of gender, and her interpretive methodology, which insists she reads and interprets gamer's bodies as sites of meaning. Indeed, they are gestures that are common throughout the gaming households. As a lived body, the gamer-as-cyborg is not only always already technological, it is also always already within and generative of the power dynamics into which it is positioned.
