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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Kurdish influencers in Istanbul’s Esenyurt district, this paper explores how gendered perceptions and expectations around everyday practices shape influencers’ content creation processes, private lives, and relations in the home and in public spaces.

Paper long abstract

This paper is developed within the framework of the ERC-funded ReWorkChange research project. Esenyurt is the largest district in Istanbul. Its population is young, with a high proportion of Kurdish residents, and consists largely of low-and middle-income families (Birarada, 2022). Many of them work as influencers on TikTok or Instagram. Their digital content creation process takes place within everyday places, including the home and public spaces, largely drawing on their private lives and their social networks. In this sense, content production is closely tied to the organization of daily life rather than being separated from it(Costa et al., 2023), thus reshaping how everyday life is organized(Miller et al., 2016). However, these shifts are not experienced uniformly in terms of gendered perceptions and expectations: while male influencers are often supported by their social networks, women are under greater surveillance and harsher criticism as they are expected to behave in gendered ways, or, e.g., to focus on housework(Thornham,2019).

The paper argues that the everyday spaces and social relations involved in digital content creation are not merely settings for digital labour, but also become part of the labour itself. Gendered expectations and perceptions play an active role in shaping how digital labour is carried out and how influencers manage their private lives. By foregrounding the dynamics between influencers’ digitally mediated content creation processes, gender, everyday spaces, and social relations, this paper contributes to the discussion on how gender and sociality at work and as work intersect with broader processes of polarisation in society.