Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how women in Turkey share self-tracking data, such as step counts, on Instagram to quantify and render visible their labor at home. By translating embodied labor exploitation into numbers, women challenge the newly redrawn home-workplace boundary in neoliberal digital capitalism.

Paper Abstract:

This paper explores how a group of women in Turkey shares self-tracking data, such as step counts or calorie scores, on Instagram to quantify and render visible their labor and productivity at home. Although neoliberal, digital capitalism makes it harder to distinguish home and workplace, my digital ethnography with woman Instagram users highlights that women working from home feel a home-workplace separation that renders their labor invisible. My participants serve as both primary caregivers in their families and digital laborers, earning income through Instagram accounts with more than 20K followers. For these women, work includes both unpaid and paid labor carried out at home. Women care for their children, cook, and clean without immediate monetary return, while also producing content on Instagram that generates income. They struggle to prove their productivity when completing both of these tasks because they believe that being registered as productive still requires working at a designated workplace. Sharing photographs on Instagram that display smartwatch numbers, such as reaching 7,000 steps while working at home, aims to publicly showcase typically invisible gendered productivity. By translating embodied labor exploitation into quantified data, smartwatches provide women with a new form of information, enabling them to challenge the newly redrawn home-workplace boundaries under neoliberal digital capitalism. If neoliberalism continues to exploit women’s labor by rendering their contributions in the market economy invisible simply because they work at home, quantifying labor at home and putting it on public display via Instagram becomes a way of challenging this capitalist disguise.