Short Abstract

This panel explores how remote work, gender, and sociality are mutually shaped. Building on anthropological debates on labour and value, we propose gender and sociality “at work” and “as work” to examine how digitally mediated remote work intersects with broader processes of polarisation in society.

Long Abstract

Anthropological studies of work and social life have long explored how gendered and domestic relations shape labour and value, traditionally assuming a domestic/work divide (Ortiz, 1994). Yet the rise of digital technologies and work at home, especially since COVID-19, has created radical change that may or may not have resulted in fundamental challenges to conventional ideas of the relationship between gender, sociality, and work (Cangià, 2024; Costa, 2024). For instance, women balancing remote work and domestic responsibilities, navigate overlapping ties of care, collaboration, and control within households, often negotiating gendered expectations alongside demands for productivity and professional ethics. The reconfiguration of time–space concepts at work, the remaking of home and community, and the rise of “third spaces” such as co-working hubs have jointly remapped gender and social relations.

In this panel, we propose to think of gender and social relations at work and as work as a coupled concept that captures the variety of digitally mediated remote work and work–life situations today. This considers both traditional, industry-based forms of remote work involving employees and more gender-oriented or relation-focused forms of labour—from care work and micro-entrepreneurship to live-streaming, influencer economies, and intimate services—where gender and relationships themselves become sources of livelihood. This, inspired by Marxist-feminist theories, moves from conventional discussion of production in a material sense to social reproduction, revealing that gender and sociality itself have become a key site of value creation and (in)equality (Vishmidt and Sutherland, 2020).

By juxtaposing these two concepts of as work and at work, the panel explores how the interaction between work, gender, and sociality mirrors broader processes of polarisation in contemporary life. We ask how new configurations of connection and productivity not only generate both empowerment and inclusion, but also new inequalities, differentiations, and divisions in the everyday lives of contemporary remote workers.

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