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Paper short abstract

Digital affordances offer vital avenues for reinventing activities that are frequently seen as disruptive and ‘unfeminine’. This paper examines how digital forms of gambling enable women to negotiate with algorithms and enact ingenious household provisioning towards performing ‘good’ motherhood.

Paper long abstract

Feminist gambling scholarship has revealed that the discourse about women’s gambling remains dominated by patriarchal frameworks. Women gamblers are more likely to be portrayed as irresponsible parental figures than their male counterparts (Palmer du Preez et al. 2021). In the Philippines, how the liberalization of online gambling in the previous decade has democratized gambling accessibility for ordinary Filipinos, especially women, remains understudied. Yet it is this very liberalization that has exposed women gamblers to intense moralizing regulation, reproducing sexist norms while rendering invisible their agency. This paper interrogates the moralistic framing of women's gambling by examining it through the lens of working-class indigenous women in Southern Philippines. Drawing on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in Davao City, I demonstrate how online gambling in a context of economic precarity is reinvented from a potentially disruptive activity into one that is socially and economically generative. For the women of my research, gambling was perceived as a calculated activity through which they could enact ingenious household provisioning while fulfilling their caregiving responsibilities. I further argue that ‘algorithmic negotiation’—the deliberate sensing, testing, and timing of platform affordances—enables modes of self-regulation integral to maintaining respectability and resisting addiction. By negotiating with online gambling algorithms, my interlocutors creatively embodied and fulfilled the norms of ‘good’ motherhood. This contributes to a broader understanding of the anthropology of gambling in a polarized world by challenging dominant perspectives that pathologize gambling and theoretically integrating a feminist framework with the notion of algorithmic negotiation.