The Thermometer Broke! Digital Purdah,Class,and Gender Transgressions on Pakistani TikTok

Abstract

Research on women’s social media practices in Muslim societies has primarily focused on middle-class or elite women, such as influencers, activists, and members of online communities. However, we know little about working-class women’s use of social media in Muslim contexts. Using ethnography and interviews, I analyze TikTok’s early popularity with working-class women in Pakistan and report three main findings. First, TikTok’s initial reception in Pakistan was fractured across class lines; whereas middle-class and elite women dismissed it, working-class women flocked to it, and TikTok became associated with a “low-class” femininity. Second, women engaged in a range of gender transgressions on TikTok. Third, women simultaneously crafted new practices of “digital purdah,” or veiling, on TikTok. I contribute to scholarship on digital purdah by, first, showing how women combine tools available on TikTok with other veiling strategies to conceal their identity while expressing their sexuality and second, arguing that “digital purdah” is compatible, rather than incongruous, with gender transgressions on TikTok. By showing how co-constituted class and gender dynamics shaped the simultaneous popularity and moral disapproval of TikTok in Pakistan, I argue for increased attention to class dynamics in studies of new social media platforms.

Emerging literature on Muslim women’s social media usage has primarily focused on educated, middle-class, and elite women (Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018; Elsheikh & Lilleker, 2021; Hurley, 2019, 2021; Newsom & Lengel, 2012). This research has explained the complex ways women navigate the digital public sphere in societies that limit women’s participation in the public domain. However, our understanding of the social media practices of working-class women in such societies, where gender seclusion prevails, remains limited.

In Pakistan, working-class women became unlikely protagonists of early TikTok cultures. Launched in 2017 in the global market, the Chinese-owned app TikTok has become a global sensation and is especially popular with young adults and teenagers (Abidin, 2021). In 2019, Pakistan was among the top five countries with the highest number of TikTok downloads and TikTok became the second-most downloaded social media app in the country (Shakil, 2019). Pakistan also has one of the highest gender gaps in internet access globally and only 19% of its population had access to the internet in 2020 (Pakistan Social & Living Standards Measurement Survey [PLSM], 2020). Notably, Pakistani working-class women, often regarded by more privileged users as digitally “backward,” started using TikTok before their higher-class counterparts. How did working-class women in Pakistan navigate gendered and classed restrictions to become active participants of incipient TikTok cultures?

Drawing on ethnography, including digital ethnography, and interviews, I explore how TikTok facilitated Pakistani women’s entry into the digital public sphere in an unprecedented manner in 2019–2020. I report three main findings. First, TikTok’s early reception in Pakistan was stratified across class lines: elite users disdained the app, whereas working-class users embraced it, and TikTok became associated with a perceived “low-class” femininity (i.e., a type of femininity that is considered inferior and looked down upon by middle-class and elite members of society). Second, unprecedented numbers of women and sexual minorities engaged in gender transgressions on TikTok by challenging norms of sexual modesty, middle-class respectability, and heteronormativity. Third, alongside these gender transgressions, women developed new practices of “digital purdah” (digital veiling) to maintain respectability and/or hide their identity in digital spaces. This allowed them to negotiate, rather than outrightly transgress certain gender norms. Veiling is a customary practice that involves the use of concealing clothing, enclosures, and other tactics to bolster gender seclusion and exhibit morality. Scholars have used the term “digital purdah” to describe how women adapt these practices to a digital context (Huang, 2018; Schoemaker, 2015). I identify the various types of gender transgressions and digital purdah that circulate on TikTok and show how TikTok’s unique infrastructure, ability to cater to users’ desires for play, and compatibility with digital purdah enhanced its appeal for working-class women.

This research contributes to existing literature on women’s social media use in South Asia, Middle East/North Africa, and other Muslim contexts by further developing the concept of digital purdah. Women combine strategies that rely on the affordances of certain social media apps with conventional forms of purdah to manage their digital identity through new forms of digital purdah. In addition, unlike research that has stressed the continuity between sexual modesty or gender segregation and digital purdah (Ali et al., 2020; Hurley, 2021; Schoemaker, 2015), I show that digital purdah is compatible with certain gender transgressions. In other words, women do not always use digital purdah to display sexual modesty but rather, may deploy digital purdah to express sexuality.

By demonstrating that TikTok’s reception in Pakistan was fractured across class lines, I also draw attention to how social media apps may become associated with specific social classes. In doing so, I highlight the importance of moving beyond the West versus East and Global North versus Global South binaries to also consider internal class stratification in non-Western contexts when analyzing emerging social media practices.

Gender Transgressions, Moral Panics, and the Digital Public Sphere in Pakistan

In August 2019, a man petitioned a Pakistani court to ban TikTok stating that it was “a great mischief of modern times” and “promoting immoral activities” (Dawn, 2019). Since then, the Pakistani government has banned TikTok four times because of “immoral/indecent” content and demanded that TikTok institute stricter content control. In 2021, Pakistan was the second largest market (after the United States) to get the most TikToks removed (Hussain, 2021). TikTok has likewise been criticized for undermining family norms in Egypt and Turkey. Such moral panics around women’s expressions of sexuality and agency are not new phenomena in Pakistan or elsewhere. Nation-building requires valorizing a specific vision of womanhood and regulating any threats to this vision (Jamal, 2006). In Pakistan, ideal womanhood is predicated on gender seclusion, sexual modesty, respectability, middle-classness, domesticity, and distance from the public sphere (Kamran, 2021; Khoja-Moolji, 2018). Bans on TikTok in Pakistan are thus a continuation of a long history of state formation through repression of women’s agency and sexuality (Toor, 2007) and other non-normative displays of gender and sexuality.

Patriarchal control over women’s mobility and behavior extends to online spaces as well. Since women’s reputation is seen as an index of familial reputation and honor (T. S. Khan, 2006), family members surveil, prohibit, and mediate women’s access to personal phones and social media to ensure that women follow normative gender scripts (Ali et al., 2020; Sambasivan et al., 2018). In fact, social media often becomes a tool of enhanced familial surveillance of women (Pearce & Vitak, 2016).

Women who participate in the digital or physical public sphere are harassed (Hassan, 2018), stigmatized, or murdered, like the Pakistani social media star, Qandeel Baloch. Despite such repercussions, Pakistani users routinely violate gender norms online, for example, by performing gender ambiguous identities (Aziz, 2021) and non-normative femininities (Alam, 2020; Shroff, 2021), and by participating in feminist digital counterpublics (Rehman, 2017).

Digital Purdah in Muslim Contexts

If some users outrightly transgress gender norms online, others deploy various strategies to negotiate their entry into the digital public sphere. Women use fake names or pictures on Facebook to disguise their identity (Kirmani, 2020); upload pictures of their younger male family members as their own profile pictures (Rajakumar, 2012); purposefully post photos that do not suggest sexual agency (Mishra & Basu, 2014); prefer more private apps like WhatsApp over publicly oriented apps like Facebook (Schoemaker, 2015); participate in women-only online spaces (Younas et al., 2020); frequently change SIM cards (Huang, 2018); and use impression-management strategies such as eschewing identification, self-monitoring and censorship, deactivating accounts, rarely engaging in visual activities, friend management, and multiple profiles (Ali et al., 2020; Pearce & Vitak, 2016; Waltorp, 2015). Hurley (2021) shows how women engage in “veiled affordances” by using tools embedded in Instagram such as filters and avatars to obscure/substitute the body to post contextually appropriate images online. I consider these practices as examples of “digital purdah,” which allow women to maintain their respectability when using new digital technology.

Digital purdah, like purdah in general, takes many forms and may increase, rather than restrict, women’s participation the public sphere (Husain, 2020; Le Renard, 2014). Keeping this malleability of purdah in mind, I bring together these studies on women’s online veiling practices with Hurley’s (2021) emphasis on “veiled affordances” to outline two central aspects of digital purdah: skillful use of the embedded functions in social media apps (e.g., using filters to mask identity) and veiling practices that do not depend on the tools of any one platform (e.g., posting pictures while wearing a veil, preferring some apps over others, or restricting visual activities online).

I also highlight new forms of digital purdah on TikTok, such as women’s use of “half videos” and cropping techniques, which involve uploading close-up videos of their hands, feet, eyes, and lips. Feminist critiques of advertising have linked cropping to sexual objectification (Kilbourne, 1999). I suggest that, in the Pakistani context, women may use such techniques to express sexual agency. Unlike scholars who have emphasized the links between Muslim women’s strategic social media practices and sexual modesty (e.g., Ali et al., 2020; Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018; Hurley, 2021; Schoemaker, 2015), I show how digital purdah can be very compatible, and co-exist, with expressions of sexuality. TikTok’s features facilitate this type of digital purdah.

Social Class, Gender, and Digital Culture

Literature on women’s social media practices in Muslim contexts has argued that we need to look beyond dominant Euro-American contexts to understand the modes and stakes of women’s self-presentations online (Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018; Hurley, 2019, 2021, 2022; Waltorp, 2015). Class analysis, however, remains underdeveloped in this literature. One exception is Baulch and Pramiyanti’s (2018) study of middle-class Hijabers on Instagram in Indonesia that shows how women’s class positions shape their digital practices. But there is little research on working-class women’s participation in the digital public sphere in Muslim contexts. In this article, I go beyond the emphasis on the binary of Western versus non-Western cultural contexts to foreground how class differences within Pakistan shaped TikTok’s early reception.

Unlike recent studies of TikTok that have focused on celebrities, virality, and privileged subjects (Abidin, 2021; Kaye, 2020; Kennedy, 2020), I examine the TikTok practices of ordinary users. Despite Pakistan’s low ranking on the internet inclusivity index, it was Pakistani working-class users and lower-middle class users, rather than elite users, who first started using TikTok. TikTok also became a mass sensation in Pakistan before it took off in the “West.” This indicates that, despite a persistent digital divide, vibrant “gray zones” (Qiu, 2009) exist where people who are otherwise excluded develop creative ways to use digital technology. Furthermore, as Lin and de Kloet (2019) show in their study of Kuaishou, an algorithmic video-sharing app popular in China, certain apps are particularly suited to enabling the production of an “unlikely creative class.” TikTok’s popularity in Pakistan is an ideal case to examine how certain apps become popular with unlikely groups of users. As Gajjala (2014) notes, studies of ICTS in the Global South often reinforce a divide between women in the Global North (considered agentic subjects using technologies for leisure) and women in the Global South (considered to be oppressed women who are empowered by others to use technology in utilitarian ways) My research challenges this reductive binary by showing how women in the Global South, who privileged users may often characterized as “backward,” use TikTok for leisure and self-expression too.

This classed digital affordance of TikTok is not unique to Pakistan. While there is little academic scholarship on this at the moment, popular culture writing has noted TikTok’s widespread popularity among working-class users in India, Turkey, and Pakistan (İnce, 2021; Maher, 2019; Nayanjyoti, 2020). People who are otherwise ignored because of caste, class, sexuality, and gender have gained significant traction on TikTok in South Asia (Afsheen & Ahmed, 2021; Subramanian, 2021; Verma, 2021). Middle Eastern women have also expressed more critical stances on gender ideologies on TikTok, in comparison to Instagram (Hurley, 2022).

In this article, I show that working-class enthusiasm and middle-class derision marked TikTok’s early reception in Pakistan. I reflect on why the app appealed to working-class women and argue that it was TikTok’s association with a perceived “low-class” femininity, and not with class-neutral or elite users’ gender transgressions, which invited disapproval from both liberals and conservatives in Pakistan.

Data and Methods

This research started during a broader research project on working-class beauty and retail workers’ experiences of labor and leisure in Pakistan. From May 2018 to August 2019, I conducted participant observation and interviews with women beauty and retail workers in their workplaces, homes, and other spaces in Karachi. During fieldwork, I noticed that large numbers of ordinary women were breaking taboos to upload attractive videos of themselves on TikTok in ways they were not doing on Facebook. Six months into this research, I designed a new research project on working-class women’s use of TikTok and simultaneously conducted research for both projects.

Besides observing how women used TikTok in their workplaces, homes, and recreational spaces, I also conducted digital ethnography. I spent time on TikTok using selective sampling to follow women, men, and non-binary users, who were transgressing local gender norms and practicing digital purdah. As a researcher of gender and sexuality in Pakistan and a Pakistani woman, I am familiar with what is considered transgressive in the local context. I downloaded TikToks, analyzed profiles of accounts, and took screenshots and notes about how people were presenting themselves on TikTok. I familiarized myself with how users experience the algorithm and infrastructure of the app and compared it with Instagram and Twitter. I also analyzed newspaper articles, government statements, videos, and discourse about TikTok on Pakistani Twitter, noting how journalists, cultural elites, and educated users discussed TikTok.

In addition, I discussed TikTok with elite and middle-class professionals and creatives (including beauty salon owners). During the first half of 2019, I taught part-time at a private university and spent time with academics, artists, and activists who, like me, were from a privileged background. I asked these professionals what they thought about TikTok and introduced several of them to the app, noting their various reactions to the app.

In early 2020, I returned to Karachi for 6 weeks and continued to include questions about TikTok in my interviews and informal chats with retail, beauty, and domestic workers. I also conducted a 1-hr long interview with a retail worker about TikTok.

My digital ethnography took an unexpected turn when I returned to my university in the United States in February 2020. TikTok’s location-based algorithm had begun to show me US-based and South Asian diaspora videos. Consequently, instead of spending time on the “For You” page, I visited accounts I had archived in Pakistan and became more attentive to the TikTok’s beauty and retail workers were uploading on their WhatsApp statuses. I regularly viewed the WhatsApp statuses of about six to eight beauty and retail workers and observed how TikToks were circulating outside TikTok.

My dual positionality as an ethnographer of a working-class context and participant in middle-class and elite milieus of Karachi, coupled with my movements back and forth between Pakistan and the United States, allowed me to compare TikTok’s reception in different social classes and contexts. Existing research on TikTok provides insights into the infrastructure and digital affordance of the app but often focuses on the “frontstage” of TikTok, that is, videos, users, and trends that become viral and are visible on the app (Abidin, 2021; Kaye, 2020). Ethnographic methods allowed me access the “backstage” world of TikTok, that is, how ordinary women used the app beyond what they uploaded on the app itself. Although I analyze both public and private accounts, I have not included any identifying information, usernames, and visual material, in recognition of the repercussions of gender transgressions in Pakistan.

Scholars of Pakistan and South Asia have used the terms lower middle-class or/and working-class to refer to low-wage service workers. A discussion on the complexity of class categorizations is beyond the scope of this article but here I use the term working-class to refer to low-wage workers in stigmatized occupations (such as domestic work, beauty work, and retail work) and middle-class and elite to refer to business owners and wage workers in white-collar occupations.

Craze Versus Cringe: TikTok’s Classed Reception in Pakistan

I first learned about TikTok in October 2018 when I noticed its striking popularity among women beauty workers in Karachi whose labor conditions I was researching. At that time, Pakistan awaited the Supreme Court’s verdict on a blasphemy case against a Christian woman, Asia Bibi. Right-wing groups had organized a hate campaign demanding the death penalty for Asia whereas progressives critical of the misuse of blasphemy laws hoped for her acquittal. Beauty workers showed me jarring TikToks on their phones, which were circulating on WhatsApp. In these videos, ordinary people (including women and children) lip-synced to a viral song: “Na paani do, na bijli do, bus Asia ko tum phaansi do” (Don’t give us water, don’t give us electricity, just hang Asia). The beauty workers who showed me these TikToks did not typically follow national political debates. However, violent right-wing content on TikTok had managed to engage them in ways other media had not.

Middle-class social media users who avidly followed heated national debates through traditional media, Facebook, and Twitter, were unaware of this conversation occurring through TikToks. When I asked friends and colleagues in Karachi from middle-class and elite backgrounds about TikTok, most had not heard of it or knew little about it. TikTok only appeared on the radar of privileged users some months into 2019 when commentators began writing about it on Twitter and mainstream media, noting its resonance among people from marginalized class, gender, sexual, and caste identities. TikTok’s early popularity in Pakistan was thus bifurcated across class lines.

If working-class users had a “craze” for TikTok (as a woman retail worker described to me), elite social media users found TikTok cringeworthy and silly. In early 2020, I asked the middle-aged owner of a high-end beauty salon in Karachi if she used TikTok or advertised her salon on it. She laughed and said, “No, no, I would never do that, but if you want to talk to someone about TikTok I can introduce you to my girls (referring to the working-class beauty workers in her salon). They all love it.” The young daughter of another beauty salon owner declared that she “hated” the app because it was so “cheap.” A small businesswoman in her twenties felt insulted when I asked her if she used TikTok to advertise her craft products. Although these women had personal and business accounts on Instagram and Facebook, they shunned TikTok, associating it with a low-class affect.

A few working-class retail workers I interviewed also distanced themselves from the app to signal status. For example, Rumaisa, a young retail worker who worked as a cashier in a mall differentiated herself from other retail workers and said, “I don’t use TikTok. I feel like it’s just chichorapan.” As Gopinath (2019) writes, chichora is a derogatory term that means a range of things such as “vulgar, depraved, over-the-top, loud, and shameful, but what ties all of these adjectives together is that such behavior is seen as indecorous, counter to the expected etiquette of the mannered bourgeoisie” (p. 123). Rumaisa’s use of the word chichorapan indicated that she, like many others, associated TikTok with the visual practices of “low-class” femininities. Later in our conversation, Rumaisa admitted that she used the app to view TikToks but did not upload any herself. By initially claiming that she did not use TikTok, Rumaisa distanced herself from “low-class” behavior to gain status by approximating a middle-class respectable femininity.

Why Did TikTok Appeal to Working-Class Women?

Prior to TikTok’s surge in popularity, working-class women in Pakistan were using Facebook but often used fake photos and names or restricted settings (Ali et al., 2020). The advent of TikTok brought about a remarkable shift as an influx of women started uploading videos of themselves without taking the usual precautions to hide their identity or stifle their sexuality. Compared with other apps, TikTok facilitated working-class women’s willingness to use TikTok with greater abandon, and in larger numbers, in important ways.

TikTok’s interface enabled groups who were not digitally savvy to use it with ease. In a mere two steps, users could make and start using TikTok accounts. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, however, required users to complete several steps and curate their own feed by following hashtags and people they may know, or know about, before joining the app. Working-class women were not necessarily connected to the social world of other digital users before they joined such apps. However, TikTok’s “For You” page and proprietary algorithm allowed them to immediately start interacting with a rich array of videos without needing to add or follow accounts. Moreover, the app’s reliance on sound and video rather than text, attracted users who were not literate.

TikTok also allowed women more options for anonymity and interaction. Although Facebook allowed women to interact with strangers too, women often had family members and friends on their Facebook accounts. Even if they had not added their male family members (and they were often obliged to do so), family members might come across their accounts through the suggested friend function on Facebook. On TikTok, family members were less likely to discover their accounts. As Pearce and Vitak (2016) find in their study of social media use in Azerbaijan, young users preferred sites such as Twitter over Facebook because dispersed social networks allowed users to “hide in the crowds,” and escape the surveillance of family, friends, and community.

Finally, TikTok catered to people’s desire to play, have fun, and gain recognition in ways that other social media apps have not, thereby making the rewards of using TikTok worth the risks of transgressing gender norms. Unlike other apps like Instagram and Facebook, which are more audience oriented, TikTok allowed users to express their creativity and create videos for personal satisfaction, which I discuss below in further detail. Working-class users, especially women, have limited options for fun in Pakistan (Kirmani, 2020). Violence, patriarchal norms, poverty, and government restrictions on cultural expression have long stifled such opportunities. Given the absence of spaces of leisure and self-expression in Pakistan, especially for women and marginalized groups, TikTok was a rare phenomenon that allowed ordinary folks opportunities for play, glamor, and fame.

Transgressing Gender Norms on TikTok

TikTok’s popularity with working-class and lower middle-class users, who are the overwhelming majority in Pakistan, mainstreamed the gender transgressions I discuss below. This, in turn, magnified the challenge TikTok posed to the status quo.

Women’s Public Expressions of Sexuality and Confidence

On TikTok, Pakistani women confidently lip-sync to songs, embrace their sexuality, flirt, and dance. By uploading such dazzling TikToks, they violate the norms of gender seclusion, purdah, sexual modesty, and middle-class feminine comportment.

For example, in 2019, scores of girls and women uploaded TikToks to the viral sound of the Bollywood item number Garmi. An item number is a sexually charged song and dance sequence in Bollywood movies. The visuals, the vocal style of the woman singer, and the lyrics are explicitly racy and at “the opposite end of the spectrum from genres of ‘respectable’ female performance” (Weidman, 2012, p. 308). The snippet of the song that became a viral audio meme on TikTok was:

Man sings: Everyone else looks fake,

Seeing you makes me brake

It’s fine when I’m far from you princess

But coming close I feel the heat

Woman sings: It got so hot in there

That the thermometer broke

My beloved is drip-dripping

Oh, he’s breaking into a sweat

(Translated from Hindi)

Although item numbers become popular in Pakistan and women listen and dance to these songs in intimate (often women-only) settings, it is uncommon for women to dance to such songs in public settings. Yet, on TikTok, women dressed up and lip-synced to this song, and many others like it, revealing the new way ordinary women were performing sexuality in online spaces. As Perera and Wijetunga (2019) note in their study of Sri Lankan women’s use of TikTok, such performances shift norms of gender and sexuality by drawing what is meant to be private out into the public and normalizing ordinary women’s creative performances for purposes of fun, rather than as professional pursuits.

I asked a retail worker who had made a TikTok to this sound and had a public TikTok account with over 40,000 followers if her parents knew about her TikTok. She laughed and responded, “No way, they’d kill me if they knew.” In a context where expressions of women’s sexuality are punished, women’s willingness to make and share such TikToks stood out as an anomaly.

In addition to explicitly sexualized performances, women also engaged in covert sexualized performances. For example, a popular trend consisted of women making a series of innocent, yet sexual, facial expressions to different sounds: a startled suggestive look, a shy smile, blowing a kiss, and a petulant expression. Such memes channeled the trope of “sexy schoolgirl” and while appearing to be innocently playful, were also instances of expressive sexuality.

Women also uploaded “funny” videos and acted out entertaining scenarios and dialogues, which poked fun at societal norms and engaged in crude humor. In such videos, women appeared confident, irreverent, and self-possessed. These bold performances undermined local norms of respectable femininity centered on docility, tradition, and respect for authority.

Many TikToks did reproduce heteronormativity by uncritically relaying normative ideas of feminine beauty and heterosexuality. Yet, such sexual and/or “frivolous” TikToks also challenged local gender norms as they diverged from the middle-class Pakistani ideal of a respectable educated woman who is sensible, modest, and virtuous.

Duets With Men

Women and girls also used the duet function in TikTok to digitally interact with men, thereby defying the otherwise strict restrictions on women’s interaction with non-kin men. Tooba, a beauty worker in her teens gleefully showed me a TikTok duet she had made with a boy who she liked but did not know. Her elder sister, who was also a beauty worker, walked over and chastised Tooba for using TikTok. Tooba rolled her eyes and turned away while her sister updated me on how their father had recently seen a duet that Tooba had made. He had shouted at Tooba and made her delete the app. Undeterred, Tooba had downloaded TikTok again.

Families attempted to restrain women’s online presence and women occasionally addressed this through TikToks. For example, a woman made a comic TikTok to this Urdu audio:

I hid from my family and made a video. I’ve blocked all my relatives. I mistakenly forgot to block one relative. He sent the video to Papa. Now Papa’s asking me, who is this boy standing next to you? (An audio of a man snickering in the background while she makes an exasperated face and smacks her head with her hand to indicate her frustration) I’m sick and tired of explaining to him, I made a dweet (duet)!

This video captured how digital interactions with non-kin men through “duets” were considered inappropriate and, because parents failed to understand how TikTok works, they thought that women personally knew the men they were making duets with. Through this video, the woman mocked her parents for being old-fashioned while also poking fun at her own situation: an innocent act had landed her in trouble with her father because of her meddling relatives. In this TikTok, the woman did not wear a veil or traditional clothing but jeans and a full-sleeved t-shirt. Her face was visible, and she was wearing make-up. Although I do not know her class status, the TikTok audio that she used was marked as non-elite. Pronouncing the word “duet” as “dweet” (and other similar words, for example, “cute” as “kweet”) is typically associated with non-elite, rather than upper-class, Pakistanis. This user thus projected a non-elite habitus through this audio.

Women also transgressed gender norms by making explicitly romantic duets with men. For example, one format of a duet consisted of a woman lip-syncing to the audio meme: “Will you hit on me? Will you tease me? Will you kiss me? (translated from Urdu)” with pauses between each question that allowed another TikTok user to reply in a duet format. In one TikTok to this sound, the woman asking these questions bit her lip, smiled, came close to the camera, and flirtingly give sideways looks to the camera at different moments inviting kisses and “teasing,” while a man responded in a similar fashion. The woman’s entire face was visible; she wore neither a physical nor a digital veil.

Gender Play

TikTok also allowed women, non-binary users, and khwaja siras (Pakistan’s legally recognized “third gender”) to perform a range of non-normative gendered performances, which I categorize here as “gender play.” These included performing non-hegemonic masculinities, gender ambiguous performances, and homosexual desire in direct and indirect ways. A popular trend in TikTok in early 2019 consisted of users covering half their face with their hands or a cloth and lip-syncing to a song. For the first half of the video the user appeared to be a glamorous woman decked out in make-up and jewelry. However, when the user revealed their full face, the other half of the face was without make-up and appeared to be a man’s face. TikTok users making these “gender reveal” videos were extremely skilled and, as the virality of such videos suggested, appreciated on TikTok for being able to play with their gender identity in this manner.

Users on TikTok also pushed the boundaries of “acceptable” behavior in other playful ways. In 2019, I came across videos on multiple TikTok accounts consisting of a close-up of a vibrant traditional blanket (kambal), under which the viewer could tell, was a body. It was unclear what part of the body was moving underneath the blanket and if someone was touching themselves. A voiceover in a sultry whisper accompanied these small movements, addressing the viewer directly by inviting them to do various things. On the surface, these requests were not sexual but, coupled with the tone, style of invitation, and the ambiguous movements under the blanket on the bed, a sexual aura permeated these videos. For example, one video might say something like this in a cooing voice, or, as baby talk: “Oh I’m soooo tired today, I’m just going to eat a paratha, do you want to eat a paratha with me. Ok I’ll give you some.” These videos projected a woman’s persona, but the gender identity of the person was ambiguous, especially so because gender norms often prohibited women from behaving and speaking in such a sexualized manner in a public venue.

Unlike Pakistani feminists on social media, who also engage in subversive gender performances, TikTok users engaging in gender play did not necessarily self-identify as feminist. A few users, although not all, embraced heteronormativity, rejected non-normative sexualities, and reproduced regressive gender tropes. Yet, they played a significant role in challenging gender ideologies, by popularizing gender play to audiences far larger than those reached by online feminist counterpublics in Pakistan.

Negotiating Gender Norms Through Digital Purdah on TikTok

Alongside gender transgressions, women also engaged in digital purdah on TikTok because they wished to be modest or/and disguise their identity to avoid censure. Digital purdah was not mutually exclusive with gender transgressions nor was it necessarily geared toward producing contextually appropriate videos. I identify four types of digital purdah on TikTok below and show how women often engaged in multiple types of digital purdah simultaneously.

Full Videos

Full videos were publicly visible videos in which women showed their full faces and hence identity, even if they used a different name for their TikTok ID, which they often did. In some of these full videos, women wore a hijab or dupatta to cover their heads, as they would when navigating a public space or meeting men. However, they did not wear a niqab (face covering) and were, hence, identifiable. By showing their full face, women risked their identity being known to all, including family members and prospective in-laws, which could result in a loss in moral reputation, a decrease in value on the marriage market, and other backlash. While full videos from women flooded TikTok, most of the beauty and retail workers I spoke to (although not all) did not make public full videos and continued to exercise some caution in how they presented themselves in online public spaces.

Half Videos

The second category of exceedingly common videos comprised what Lubna, a retail worker I interviewed about TikTok, referred to as “half videos.” These videos were as popular as full videos but consisted of women creatively hiding their identity in multiple ways. Instead of showing their faces, women made TikToks featuring just half their faces, or only their lips or eyes as they lip-synced to songs. Some videos included just their hands or feet, the backs of their bodies, their bodies cropped below the neck, or their faces mostly covered by their hair. Users creatively used a range of TikTok effects and filters to make captivating videos without featuring their entire face. For example, women frequently used a feature in TikTok to split the screen into three, each section of the screen featuring the same close-up of their eyes or lips as they expressively lip-synced or/and moved their eyes to romantic songs. Lubna exclusively uploaded half videos on her semi-private account, but other women gained more than a million followers on public accounts without showing their full faces or bodies.

These cropping and collage techniques projected expressive sexuality rather than sexual modesty and such close-up visuals were often more sexually suggestive than other full videos. Half videos were not solely a result of women’s desire to practice purdah for reasons related to religiosity or modesty. Rather, they became a way for women to have fun on TikTok and challenge gender norms while safeguarding themselves from violence and stigma. For example, Hira, a teenage domestic worker, regularly uploaded full videos on TikTok. However, after her neighbors showed her abusive father her TikToks who then made her delete the app, she started uploading half videos for public viewing on her new account. Although she did not personally object to full videos, she adopted digital purdah to conceal her identity and thus, evade her father’s anger.

The audio meme from the item number song Garmi (with the popular refrain “the thermometer broke”) accompanied both sexy full videos and half videos. One TikTok, for example, featured this sound along with a sparkling TikTok filter of four young women in identical black burkas, wearing different shoes. The video was cropped to show just the lower third of their covered bodies while they walked in slow-motion to this sound. Neither their faces nor their full bodies were visible through two layers of veiling. The first veil was the burka or the physical veil they wore. The second veil was the digital purdah practice that relied on cropping. The image of women in burkas, which is typically associated with modesty or women’s investment in respectable femininity and religiosity, gained another meaning when pasted alongside this explicitly sexual song, slow-motion effect, and sparkling filter, which created a catwalk effect. Like many TikTok users, women on Pakistani TikTok creatively reinterpreted the meanings associated with audio memes to expand memes in new directions (Abidin & Kaye, 2021). In matching specific audio, filters, and video on TikTok, they simultaneously engaged in digital purdah and gender transgressions.

Cross-Platformed TikToks

Women frequently uploaded TikToks of themselves to their WhatsApp statuses, instead of sharing them on TikTok. I often saw glamorous TikToks of Saira, a retail worker, posing in different outfits or lip-syncing to romantic songs on her WhatsApp status. Yet, when I went to the TikTok IDs (these were not always from her own ID that I knew of) that appeared on these videos, these TikToks were not visible there. Sometimes, these TikToks would only be visible for a day or two before Saira removed them or changed the setting to private. Saira, like others, preferred to share TikToks on her WhatsApp status, rather than TikTok, because it afforded her a more bounded and intimate space to share TikToks with friends or family whose numbers she had saved.

However, cross-platforming could also land women into trouble. Kiran, a young retail worker, told me that her brother who lived in Dubai had prohibited her from having a public TikTok account but allowed her to upload TikToks on her WhatsApp status. On one occasion, she got a stern phone call from him, ordering her to remove a TikTok she had uploaded on WhatsApp. She had made the TikTok with her women co-workers in the aisle of the department store where she worked. Her brother objected to the video because he had noticed a man in the corner staring at them while they were making the TikTok. Kiran smilingly removed the video, unfazed by her brother’s intervention, and used to his transnational surveillance of her social media.

In addition to uploading TikToks of themselves, women also uploaded TikToks from other accounts on their WhatsApp statuses featuring romantic poetry, religious sayings, self-help mantras, songs of betrayal and unrequited love, and on occasion, socio-political commentary. Before TikTok’s popularity, women shared similar posts on Facebook and WhatsApp and continue to share content on their WhatsApp statuses that is not from TikTok. However, TikTok has expanded such practices by providing women with a richer variety of content they relate to and can interact with more easily.

Private Videos

Women also made TikToks for themselves or to show or send to their boyfriends, friends, and family members as private messages on WhatsApp. Iman, a retail worker in her early twenties, extensively used filters to make romantic TikToks, such as a close-up of her holding her boyfriend’s hand, or of herself singing songs. However, she only watched these TikToks herself or sent them to her boyfriend. Iman’s boyfriend disapproved of her sharing her videos online and also objected to her job. Although she refused to quit her job until they were married, she quit the digital public sphere on his insistence and made sure his TikTok was private too.

Women who did not share TikToks publicly on TikTok or other social media platforms continued to enjoy themselves immensely by making TikToks of themselves for their own personal consumption. Often, they downloaded their TikToks on their phones and deleted them from the app or kept their TikTok accounts private. On occasion they showed these saved TikToks on their phones to their friends and me when we were together and watched them repeatedly themselves.

Conclusion

In this article, I intervene in discussions of the digital divide by showing how working-class women in Pakistan have become unlikely protagonists of early TikTok cultures. TikTok’s interface caters to working-class users’ desire for play, in a context where they have little access to other avenues of leisure and cultural production. Working-class women, who have otherwise remained disengaged from digital public spheres, have become consumers and producers of digital content on TikTok at an unprecedented scale. In contrast, middle-class and elite women initially shunned TikTok for its low-class associations. It is important to note that working-class women in Pakistan have historically expressed their sexuality in other media genres such as cinema, theater, and dance (Brown, 2007; M. S. Khan, 2022). However, working-class women’s performances of sexuality in these mediums have remained confined to the minority of professional dancers, sex workers, actors, and performers. I argue that TikTok has mainstreamed performances of expressive sexuality to include a wide swathe of working-class women. In a metaphorical sense, the thermometer has broken, because TikTok has raised the temperature of gender transgressions to an unprecedented level in Pakistan; the gender transgressions of ordinary women, and not just those of celebrities, feminists, elite women, or professional performers, have become common on social media via TikTok.

Alongside these performances of expressive sexuality, women have developed new practices of digital purdah on TikTok. I further develop the concept of digital purdah by showing how it comprises tactics that combine a skillful use of the tools embedded in social media platforms and other tactics that do not depend on the platform itself. I also identify the specific ways that women practice digital purdah on TikTok, drawing attention to cropping and other such techniques. In contrast to other scholars who understand digital purdah as linked to sexual modesty, I argue that digital purdah can be compatible with, and enable, gender transgressions.

While cognizant of the feminist critiques of visibility politics, scholars have argued that discussions on women’s self-presentations online need to move beyond a focus on postfeminist contexts in the Global North (Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018; Hurley, 2019, 2021, 2022). In this article, I make a context-specific intervention in debates on sexualized femininities in popular culture. Pakistani TikTokers reproduce heteronormative ideals of femininity and heterosexuality. Sexualized femininities are no panacea for patriarchy and TikTok is no feminist utopia (e.g., algorithmic suppression on the app gives young, White, wealthy, normative femininity a bigger platform as compared with other types of femininities (Kennedy, 2020)). However, in the Middle East and South Asia, where gender seclusion remains a dominant barrier to women’s equality and labor force participation, ordinary women’s unprecedented entry into the digital public sphere and expressions of sexuality via TikTok pose an important, if limited, challenge to gender hegemony. As evidenced by the multiple bans on TikTok in Pakistan, the state also perceives TikTok as a threat to gender and family norms.

Finally, I contribute an important class perspective to discussion on women’s social media practice in contexts characterized by gender seclusion. While existing research has made a convincing case for thinking about the politics of visibility as embedded in different sociohistorical and cultural contexts, this research has not yet focused in a meaningful way on internal class stratification in “non-Western” contexts. My research shows that not only are working-class women important protagonists of social media cultures on TikTok in Pakistan, but that elite women in the same context deride working-class women’s TikTok performances. Adopting an intersectional perspective that focuses on both class and gender allows us to see that while conservatives decry TikTok for undermining norms of gender and sexuality, liberals simultaneously disdain TikTok for its “low-class” affect, particularly its associations with “low-class” femininity.

Limitations and Future Research

My research design partially relied on my social embeddedness with a select group of beauty and retail workers. I analyzed TikTok accounts with large followings but did not purposefully interview working-class women who were famous TikTokers, of which there are many. In addition, although I have used the category of Muslim women to highlight similarities in digital purdah across diverse contexts, Muslim women are not a monolith and non-Muslim women in South Asia also practice digital purdah. Further research may thus explore how working-class TikTok celebrities and women in diverse cultural and religious contexts engage in digital purdah and gender transgressions.

Comparative research may also investigate why certain apps become associated with a working-class habitus, whereas others do not, and to what extent, class associations influence government decisions to ban apps on grounds related to “indecency.” In Pakistan, both TikTok and Bigo were particularly associated with working-class users and the state has, in the past, banned both apps for “immoral” and “obscene” content. Gender transgressions circulate on other social media platforms too and feminist movements in Pakistan have used platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to significant effect. The Pakistani state, which frequently engages in internet censorship of apps and websites, has not yet banned these other platforms on account of “indecent” content (although it has banned social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube for circulating “blasphemous” content). Likewise, the upper classes have embraced, rather than derided, these other social media apps. Further research is required to assess how TikTok’s association with the working-classes and “low-class” femininities may have influenced the state’s decisions to ban it.

Although certain sections of the “respectable” middle classes still consider TikTok to be “third class,” it is increasingly accepted across social classes, as well as by celebrities, mainstream political parties, and influencers who were not using the app when I first started this research. How do the class associations of social media platforms evolve over time? To what extent did TikTok’s global and “Western” popularity shape TikTok’s changing reputation in Pakistan? Future research can thus examine factors that have contributed to the transformation of Pakistani elites’ initial dismissal of TikTok into widespread acceptance.