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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnography with Romanian women truckers, this paper theorizes the 'affective tachograph.' It explores how TikTok facilitates both feminist resistance and corporate surveillance, analyzing the tension between online solidarity and the misogynistic backlash of the logistics 'manosphere'.

Paper long abstract

Engaging with the digital "terrain of struggle," this paper investigates the gendered dynamics of transnational trucking. Drawing on ethnography with Romanian women drivers, I propose the "affective tachograph" to theorize how digital platforms function as dual mechanisms of neoliberal subjectivation and resistance.

While recruitment campaigns instrumentalize "corporate feminism" to plug labor shortages with flexible workers from the European semi-periphery, the reality of the truck cabin contradicts this rhetoric. I argue that social media, particularly TikTok, becomes an arena where the "logistical colonisation of life" is both contested and reproduced. On one hand, women use these platforms to perform resilience, disrupting the industry's hegemonic masculinity. On the other, this visibility exposes them to intense "digital misogyny" from the logistics "manosphere."

Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how the industry co-opts this digital labour. The "affective tachograph" implies that the emotional labour performed online is monitored and quantified by algorithmic gazes, turning solidarity into a metric of employability. By analyzing this digital dialectic, the study reveals how fourth-wave feminist discourse is paradoxically utilized to sustain the brutal "just-in-time" flows of logistical capitalism, trapping women between physical exhaustion and digital performance.