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In the last few decades, videogames have become a mass phenomenon and have progressively carved out an important space in society and culture. Today, they have growing capabilities to reproduce realistic scenarios, and are increasingly used as an artistic medium with significant narrative potential. In this context, players also need to confront with the representation of aspects of the Self, moving and interacting within video games’ parallel worlds. How these aspects are represented in media can be an important influence on a psychological, cultural and social level. Gender representation can be argued to be almost universal in media and reflects real-world beliefs and attitudes. Despite areas of progress, videogames often feature sexist, prejudiced or biased representations of men and women, both from an aesthetical and narrative point of view. This contribution will discuss the role of gender representation in videogames, aiming to summarize the main features and specificities of different portrayals. Specifically, men characters were over represented compared to women characters as a lead both in the narrative and in promotional material, although recent improvements were observed. Portrayals of women appeared to feature lean-ideal body idealization, sexualization, objectification, as well as reduced agency. Moreover, portrayals of men appeared to feature muscular-ideal body idealization, restrictive emotionality, and the overuse of aggressiveness and assertiveness. These restrictive representations can have harmful consequences in the users’ reality, such as fostering sexist attitudes and beliefs, promoting restrictive gender roles and ideals of appearance, as well as increasing tolerance of violent behaviors. This analysis suggests that reducing stereotypical and sexist representations, promoting diverse and nuanced representations, and efforts for critical engagement with media portrayals may help reduce these negative effects.

In this essay the aim will be to reflect on the connection between colonization and feminization of the conquered territory, considering that in the asymmetric scheme of patriarchal domination, the territory or nation includes and incorporates gender, and gender is the sexual center of recognition in the construction of territorial and colonial identities. The analysis will refer to the intersections between sex and race, fundamental elements in the dichotomous domination-oppression mechanism, which is very strong in the colonial conquest phase. Colonialism emerges, therefore, as a masculine and phallocentric dimension, in which the female body becomes the center of production of the sexualization of the body inscribed within a social and public racial reproductive process. Feminism, especially the postcolonial theoretical horizon, has reflected on the connection of colonialism with racism and sexism, as elements aimed at a process of othering the 'other world' with a connotation of permanence. In this perspective, the categorization of the "Third World" woman – as a sexually oppressed woman – is interpreted in a post-modern key of colonizing misogyny that has influences in today's society, and this conceptualization is linked to the opposition between "western" feminism and "non-western" feminism.

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This article studies sexual violence in the 1990s conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda. First I will show how the ethnic definition is misleading, since it hides what is really the construction of nationalism, implemented through the use of the female body as a symbol of the nation. Second, I will examine how this violence interconnects nationalism, gender, gendered-body and sexuality with the aim of affecting the future of the enemy group. Thirdly, I will describe how, in the conflicts' aftermaths, recovery programmes are not adequate and exclude many survivors, who are marginalized, stigmatized and silenced and thus subjected to new violence.