The Intersectional Powers of Digital Play

How Class, Gender and Morality Shape Postcolonial Childhoods in Pakistani Middle-Class Homes

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with middle-class mother-child dyads in Islamabad, this article examines digital play as a site where class, gender, religion, and colonial legacy meet in contemporary Pakistani childhoods. Combining Bourdieu's account of cultural capital with an intersectional framework, we argue that digital play in these households operates across a wider spectrum than the literature typically describes, from active imaginative engagement to adult-curated passive consumption to imaginative rehearsal of digital practice in the absence of devices. Across this spectrum, cultural capital is invested at the point of content curation: mothers select English-language channels, Western cartoons, and educational apps that align their children's futures with globally legible competencies. This labor is gendered, and the daily supervision of children's screen time is typically performed by domestic workers whose own classed educational trajectories make them unable to reproduce the capital they are hired to protect. The gap between maternal curation and caregiver supervision is not a flaw in these strategies but a mechanism of class reproduction. At the same time, mothers live with unresolved ambivalence, framing English-language exposure as protective of children's futures while recognizing much of the content as trivial, morally questionable, or culturally alien to Islamic family life. We conclude with implications for early childhood education and for research on digital childhoods in the Global South.