Recognition Labor and Platformed Domesticity: Self-Formation and Gendered Negotiations among Turkish Muslim Women

Abstract

As digital platforms increasingly shape everyday life, they are also becoming sites where gendered domestic labor is made visible and new relational dynamics with others are cultivated. While scholarship on platform labor has increasingly addressed gendered experiences, it has largely focused on Western and middle-class contexts. This thesis addresses this gap by examining how Turkish Muslim women from traditional backgrounds engage with digital platforms and how platform-mediated practices shape their pursuit of recognition amid multiple moral commitments. The study examines the motivations behind creators’ engagement in platformed domestic labor, how they present their culinary skills on the platforms, and how such practices reshape their relations to the self and their gendered positions. Drawing on digital ethnography, the research combines longitudinal observation of YouTube channels and related platform activities, analysis of selected videos, and in-depth interviews with twenty women who produced cooking content on digital platforms. The findings reveal how women transformed domestic competencies rooted in gendered socialization into capacities for action through platform mediation. Through this process, they cultivated new skills and forged relations of recognition. In doing so, invisible domestic labor was translated from the private sphere into publicly visible digital content and incorporated into platform economies, enabling forms of social recognition and potential monetization. However, because these processes of recognition were mediated by platform governance mechanisms, women also encountered forms of misrecognition and developed affective responses to them. At the intersection of domestic life and digital platforms, women navigated conflicting normative frameworks shaped by platform economies and gendered moral frameworks, continually recalibrating their labor and platform practices. As these platform practices became embedded in everyday life, women developed reflexive capacities through experiences of recognition and misrecognition, transforming their relationship to themselves, their labor, and gendered normative frameworks. The thesis develops the concepts of recognition labor and platformed domesticity, showing how women transform domestic labor into platform-mediated forms of visibility, valuation, and recognition. Recognition labor operates across moral, economic, and political dimensions that are shaped by the infrastructural, financial, and institutional conditions and constraints of digital platforms. By examining platformed domestic practices, the thesis contributes to scholarship on the gendered dimensions of platformization and advances understandings of self-formation through everyday digital labor in situated socio-cultural contexts.