“Sensing” productivity at home: self-tracking technologies, gender, and labor in Turkey

Abstract

Abstract This article explores how women in Turkey use sensing technologies to render visible their productivity at home in ways that contest home–workplace boundary under neoliberal, digital capitalism. It does so by focusing on a group of lower- and middle-class women, who work from home as both paid laborers and unpaid caregivers. Although neoliberalism makes it harder to distinguish home and workplace, my digital ethnography highlights that women working from home feel a home–workplace separation that renders invisible their productivity. By translating embodied knowledge into quantified data, smartwatches provide women with new information that I call revelations. Women share these revelations on digital platforms to render visible their productivity at home in ways that transgress the home–workplace boundary. By exploring these revelations as moments of “otherwise,” this article highlights both when smartwatches reproduce neoliberal mentality and become tools for others in the public to register its exploitative consequences.