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

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

self-tracking, sensors, domestic labor, productivity, home–workplace separation, neoliberal/digital capitalism, gender

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 ethnog-
raphy highlights that women working from home feel a home–workplace separation that renders invisible their productivity. By translating em-
bodied knowledge into quantified data, smartwatches provide women with new information that I call revelations. Women share these revela-
tions 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.

Nazlı O ̈ zkan1,*

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad017

20 April 2023

PERI IRAWAN

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