Gendered networks of play: Regulating digital games and technological subjects in the home

This dissertation explores the domestication of digital games in the home in order to ask how access to and experiences of play may be constrained or enabled by gendered notions of ludic technologies and their uses. Empirical methods including semi-structured interviews with ten families and observations of play were mobilized to get a sense of how game play is gendered in everyday life. The results demonstrate how parental and youth practices can serve to reaffirm gendered associations between technological proficiencies and pleasures and masculine and feminine subject-positions. Such relationships are articulated through two mutually constitutive regulatory systems – the rule systems put into place by parents about time for, content of, and spaces dedicated to digital play activities, alongside the disciplinary system of normative gender performance that perpetuates an association between technological mastery and masculinity while troubling any such relationship between feminine subjects and tech savvy. The participants in this study engaged with the pressures of an increasingly neoliberal ethos in everyday life, particularly visions of the opportunities offered by these technologies as well as the potential risks underlying certain forms of engagement. Parents and children alike regulated play, thus challenging and reaffirming hegemonic configurations of legitimate forms of digital play linking to essentialized conceptions of gender.