Performing home through women’s care practices in digital spaces

Abstract

This article investigates how the home is performed by two differing groups of women in Australia through gendered care practices and domestic representations in digital spaces. Specifically, it examines the ways Australian women craft bloggers use Instagram and older Filipina-Australians use Facebook to enact diverse modes of mediated care in and beyond the home setting. The analysis draws on two separate ethnographic studies. The first study involved six Australian women to investigate their craft blogging practices on Instagram from 2014 to 2019 where they engaged their varying sized online audiences ranging from 1000 to more than 100,000 followers. The second study included 15 older Filipina-Australians in Victoria, Australia in March 2023 to understand their digital care practices using Facebook to maintain transnational connections among family members and peers. The studies utilised in-person research interviews, visual methods and a digital ethnography. This article extends the model of the moral economy of the household to highlight a range of mediated domestic and care practices carried out across physical and digital spaces shaped by gendered labour practices, transborder care expectations and digital platform affordances. These practices reveal the role of the home as a site and symbol for these different groups in negotiating the tensions of the unequal division of social reproduction and care within the Globalised Care Chain.

Introduction

The home is a site of distinct gendered division of labour. Women are ascribed greater responsibilities of housework and childcare in the household, but gendered roles have been re-shaped with prolonged challenges to social and economic inequality and the impacts of expanding global economies. Yet, as research has shown, the liberation of women to take on new roles in paid employment did not lead to a radical restructuring of the economics of housework and care (Baxter and Hewitt, 2013; Bianchi et al., 2012; Chesters, 2012). In this context ‘care’ is defined as duties or activities that are provided to other people, either because they cannot undertake these tasks themselves, or they do not feel disposed to do so. It is often applied to domestic labour – paid and unpaid – at times masking the value of this labour (Nadasen, 2017; Yeates, 2004). Global economies of care have created new kinds of labour hierarchies and mobilities that play out transnationally and within countries, where the activities associated with care are still largely performed by women and fall outside of the formal economy – even when these are supplemented by various forms of paid care. Scholars articulate this as the ‘Global Care Chain’ (Nadasen, 2017; Yeates, 2004) to refer to the links of paid and unpaid forms of care distributed unevenly around the world. Nguyen et al. (2017) extend the definition of the Global Care Chain, arguing that while care incorporates aspects of social reproduction, caring goes beyond that to encompass an ‘on-going social process...[that] takes into account the different levels of ‘caring for the self,' ‘caring for the others' and ‘caring for the world’ (p. 202).

The introduction of media technologies into the home has implications for gender and the performance of care within the Global Care Chain. Chambers (2016) charts the complex relationship of media to the home and household from the early twentieth century, with early radio sets through to television and the Internet. Rather than media technologies determining gender relations in the home in a straightforward way, for Chambers, ‘digital technologies undermine, complicate or reinforce relations of gender’ (2016, p. 1). Media technologies have been studied in terms of how they change practices and habits of dwelling in domestic spaces – from new norms and practises of family television viewing (Morley, 1986) to new ways of parenting via mobile and digital media (Livingstone and Blum-Ross, 2020).

Migration media scholars have shown the home to be at the forefront of global economic, social and political transformations with media technologies central to relations of gendered mediated care (Boccagni, 2017; Madianou and Miller, 2012; Walsh and Näre, 2016). For instance, women from the Global South who migrate to new countries use technologies to enact mothering at a distance (Parreñas, 2020; Uy-Tioco, 2007). This is on top of breadwinning to support the needs of distant family members, paving the way for women’s ‘double work’ (Lim, 2014). Meanwhile, women in the Global North have used technologies to assert new kinds of mediated care within and beyond the home to juggle paid and unpaid work. Some leverage online audiences to earn income and mitigate economic precarity as part of the platformised creative economy (Duffy et al., 2021; Luckman and Thomas, 2018). In this way, the household is shaped and transformed by global and digital economies which in turn shape global care chains and the location of groups of women within these in complex ways.

Definitions of home are not fixed or ever settled and have been transformed through their mediation by technologies. While home is typically thought of as a physical space for living and shelter, home can be understood as a process (Ahmed, 1999; Lloyd and Vasta, 2017) and an idea that connects places and relations at different scales (Blunt and Dowling, 2022) and across digital and physical spaces (Humphry, 2022). Digital media technologies are involved in the redrawing and erosion of the boundaries between the public and private, work and leisure, production and reproduction (Bakardjieva, 2022). Importantly, the home can connote contradictory meanings and be a site of exclusion, violence and danger. The home can also be understood as a type of performance, taking cues from Butler’s (1990) model of performativity, which explains the way identity is constituted by gendered acts, bodily expressions, and the spaces we inhabit, including the home. Indeed, Butler specifically drew attention to the importance of temporality and spatiality in the formation of gendered identity: ‘gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time; instituted in an exterior space’ (Butler, 1990, p.179). Richardson (2018) similarly explains the way the performance of home is intimately bound up in performances of identity: ‘Our homes are differentiated – different from one another, but also differentiating – defining us and our identities and placing us in relation to one another’ (p. 21).

Differing groups of women use and adopt digital media to perform care in and beyond the home while negotiating the tensions of the unequal division of domestic labour within the Global Care Chain. Through the use of digital and social media, the home becomes a site and medium for this mostly unpaid-for-labour directed outwards towards bridging familial and community networks. It is also the locus of creative endeavours across physical and digital spaces, a place to carry out mothering at a distance and affirm transnational ties and identities. Women in a wide range of caring situations perform multiple gendered tasks and roles, such as Filipina female migrants who work in and beyond the host country: as nurturer and also paid (or sometimes paid) worker (Lim, 2014), and women in the Global North who are also family carers, using blogs and social media platforms to build a sense of belonging and solidarity among networks of women outside of the nuclear or extended family. The connection of these groups sits at the intersection of a feminist re-reading of domesticity to reveal the diverse caring practices of different groups of women in performing the home as shaped by the media, gender structures, and moral systems that are dynamically negotiated and subject to a range of local and global structuring forces.

In this article, the focus is on the mediated care practices of two groups of women in Australia – women craft bloggers who use Instagram and older Filipina-Australians who use Facebook. We chose these two groups to highlight the way that disparate groups of women around the world, who have caring obligations, negotiate these within the Global Care Chain. This selection supports a comparison of the similarities and differences between each group in relation to continued unequal recognition of the gendered labour of care and social reproduction. These are usually, but not always, performed in the home, and increasingly digitally across social media platforms. An intersectional approach (Crenshaw, 1989; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020) informed the selection of cases, to analyse the ways that media technologies are adopted and integrated/domesticated by different groups of women to enact mediated care shaped by intersecting inequalities within global digital economies. We build on Nguyen et al.’s (2017) extended definition of the Global Care Chain that incorporates different expressions and communities of care as ongoing social processes. Care practices are understood to be embedded in social relations within and beyond the household mediated by age, class, gender, ethnicity, and media access and systems. Social media posting allows a glimpse into the very private spaces of the home that have traditionally been shielded from the public eye and sheds light on how some of these activities are selected to be performed publicly across digital spaces as a strategic extension of the moral economy of the household. By comparing the mediated care practices of these women, we reveal not only how groups perform these in distinctive ways depending on their position within the Global Care Chain but also according to different platforms (Instagram and Facebook) and platform cultures (‘content creators’ and ‘ordinary users’).

In the following sections, we map the key studies and frameworks integral in unpacking the transformation of the mediated and gendered home. We underscore the role of the moral economy of the household perspective shaping the uptake, use and negotiations of digital media in a networked home, making the argument that via its mediation the moral economy of the household extends to sites beyond the material home. We present the research methods used in the two studies and the findings and discussions follow. We conclude the paper by recapping the key points raised as well as making critical reflections on the insights generated in understanding the meanings, dynamics, and tensions of the networked and gendered home by groups of carers in differing contexts and how these practices fit within global care chains.

The moral economy of the (mediated) household

The home has been studied as a site for adoption and integration of media technologies within domestic family routines and rituals. The theory of domestication originally introduced by Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) provides a framework for analysing how meanings are configured in relation to one another through these processes thereby establishing the moral economy of the household. This model introduced relationality as an important concept – home, gender, familial relationships, kinship, and media technologies are co-constituted to develop distinct values, shared rules and understandings that is both apart and part of the formal market revealing its contradictory relation to the economic and public sphere (Silverstone et al., 1992).

Some scholars have shown that the moral economy of the household can extend to sites beyond the home, in this way challenging the emphasis on the household as a private, unified and stable system over the instabilities and power struggles that take place there in practice (Haddon and Silverstone, 2000; Humphry and Chesher, 2021). For example, Tufuor et al.’s (2015) research of single migrant women from Ghana identified that moral obligations extended to community members outside their immediate households. Likewise, Näre (2011) showed how the care work and labour of Italian migrant domestic workers was characterised by a moral economy or ‘moral contract’ because of the location of their work within the private domain of the home without being members of these family households.

For the group of Australian women and older Filipina-Australians the space and moral economy of the household as it is configured and curated through these relational practices also becomes a site of mediated care that extends to those outside and beyond the home. This domestic performativity in digital spaces has not featured as significantly in media domestication scholarship, but it is an important dimension of the socio-material practices of homemaking and of negotiating the gendered home. Practices of representing domestic spaces to the outside are culturally and historically specific, oftentimes linked to long term transformations involving the construction, destruction and remaking of home under a wide variety of conditions, and in response to globalised and transnational forces.

Morley (2000), one of the founders of the domestication model, called for the need to address the ways in which traditional ideas of home and homeland were being destabilised by migration and mobile technologies. Relatedly, scholars of migration and transnationalism have demonstrated the important ways that home can act materially and symbolically to maintain family relations and ideas of home using mobile media and the digital spaces afforded by social media platforms. In the case of migrant mothers, for instance, digital technologies have allowed them to perform mothering at a distance (Parreñas, 2015). Conforming to expectations of being a ‘good mother’ and managing the ambivalent feelings towards mothering from afar (Madianou and Miller, 2012), migrant Filipina mothers use mobile phones to provide health advice and remotely guide their children in doing assignments (Madianou and Miller 2012; Uy-Tioco, 2007). In some cases, they access visual information through exchanges in messaging applications to assess and support the health and wellbeing of their distant children (Cabalquinto, 2022; Kędra, 2020). However, these women perform ‘double work’ (Lim, 2014), such as enacting both nurturing and breadwinning roles (Parreñas, 2015). And for older female migrants, in addition to mothering from afar (Parreñas 2020), they also perform grandparenting in a local (Baldassar et al., 2022) and transnational domain (Nedelcu 2017; Parreñas 2020).

The narrative of ‘the good mother’ is also taken up in the ‘new domesticity movement’ where a revived interest in domestic life has been attributed to growing concerns among groups of middle-class women about the uncertainties of modern life such as the state of the environment and the economy (Matchar, 2013). The response has been a shift by some women to consciously embrace and share their private worlds online unconstrained by the negative connotations of the idea of the ‘stay-at-home mother’ in first- and second-wave feminism. But as Wilson and Yochim (2017) point out; the sharing of images of idyllic homes and happy children can unwittingly conform to neoliberal ideals and gloss over underlying problems. We build on these ideas of home as a moral economy and site of mediated care that is performed beyond its material and geographic boundaries by exploring women’s curation of everyday domestic practices and representations in digital spaces. As noted, we draw on notions of performativity to argue that social care relations as well as women’s subjectivities are intimately bound up in performances of the home that play out across a range of interconnected digital and physical spaces locally and transnationally.

We examine how the home comes to be gendered in and through the performance of care and domestic representations by two cohorts of women: older Filipina women in Australia who sustain local and transnational ties through their use of mobile and digital media; and Australian craft bloggers, mostly middle-class women, who post and share images of their home on blogs and social media. We deliberately take an intersectional approach in our selection of participant groups, to unpack the different domains of agency and inequalities that impact on their gendered caring practices, which are underpinned by different social demographics and intersecting structural inequalities (Crenshaw, 1989). This approach allows us to interrogate how complex power relations shape societies including experiences of everyday life as it accounts for multiple factors, including race, gender class and age (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020). We highlight the role of social media platforms and cultures in shaping their curated performance of the home and explore issues of identity, labour, visibility, and audience.

Methodology

This paper examines the performance of the home through the care practices and domestic representations of two different groups of women living in Australia.

Participating groups

The first group is made up of six women ranging in age from early 30’s to late 40’s. They live on the east coast of Australia, three in capital cities, two in rural settings and one in a regional town. All are white, middle-class women who have completed secondary and sometimes tertiary education. The group is part of a well-documented resurgence of interest in home crafts both in the making and purchasing of hand made goods (Luckman, 2015; Luckman and Andrew, 2020). They belong to a cohort of mostly women who share their creative endeavours both as a passion project and as a potential digital career opportunity despite the precarious nature of this employment (Duffy et al., 2021; Luckman and Thomas, 2018).

The second group is composed of fifteen older Filipina female Australians living in the state of Victoria, part of the increasing older migrant population in Australia. In Australia in 2021 there were 4.2 million people (16% of Australia’s total population) who were aged 65 and over (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare AIHW, 2021). In Victoria, there are 3789 older Philippine-born or individuals aged 65 and over (Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2018 ). These individuals have been part of the long history of migration of Filipinos to Australia, as shaped by family reunification schemes, education opportunities, and a range of professional and skills-based positions facilitated by the criteria set in the Migration Act of 1958 (Espinosa, 2017). For this study, most of the older Filipina-Australian women who participated in the research study moved to Australia and married their Australian partners (Aquino, 2017). Nonetheless, Filipino Australians are the fifth largest migrant community in Australia.

Research methods

The two researchers engaged with the cohorts by deploying a range of qualitative methods in two separate studies.

In the study of Australian craft bloggers, the author conducted in-person research interviews and a digital ethnography in which she followed six participants on multiple social media platforms for 5 years (from 2014 to 2019). The women were selected to take part in the project in 2014 based on personal blogs that documented their domestic and creative life and provided a space for like-minded women to engage and connect. At the start of the research period, the author visited each of the women at their home to conduct in-depth interviews about their blogging and social media practices. The visit also provided an opportunity to see each of the women in the context of their physical domestic space. As Hine (2017) points out, people do not solely live their lives online. The digital ethnography allowed for a study of shared interests that was unconstrained by physical location and gave the flexibility to observe participants across multiple online sites, with Instagram the primary platform used by all. Throughout the research period, the women developed their crafting skills (e.g. knitting, weaving, screen printing) based on knowledge handed down through family connections and then built on that expertise through engagement with the online creative communities they often helped establish. Over that time, some women became more focused on monetising their social media offerings through offering their Instagram audiences short courses in specific craft practices or how to leverage social media as a creative business.

In the study of older Filipina-Australians, the author conducted in-depth interviews and visual methods to unpack the access and use of mobile phones, social media, mobile applications, and a range of media devices among fifteen older Filipina-Australians in Victoria, Australia. Data collection was conducted in March 2023. The study participants belong to the growing population of ageing migrants in Australia. There are 51,290 Filipino-Australians in Victoria, followed by New South Wales with 86,749 Filipino-Australians (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021). The age range of participants was from 66 to 79 years old (Mean = 72). Twelve had a bachelor’s degree, two finished high school, and one held a pre-nursing degree. Two had certificate degrees in Australia and one had two postgraduate studies from the Philippines. Seven participants were based in regional areas (Geelong and Ballarat) of Victoria and seven were from Metropolitan areas. Most of the participants moved to Australia in the 1970s and 1980s because of a family reunification scheme or marriage to Australian spouses (Espinosa, 2017). Ten were retired, two were working full-time, one was working with two jobs, one was working part-time, and one was volunteering. The author interviewed the older Filipina-Australians in their home setting about their migration history, everyday digital media practices, positive and negative experiences using a range of mobile devices, as well as coping strategies. The visual methods allowed the participants to show digital content they have received and shared, as well as their reflections on the content. There were 103 photos produced through photo documentation and 155 photos were captured through photo elicitation. The data was coded and analysed through a thematic analysis (Lindlof, 2019), mapping the rationale and consequences of everyday digital media use.

Discussion of findings

The findings illustrate the everyday digital care practices of two groups of women in Australia. We argue that social (age, gender, and ethnicity), economic (class), and political (citizenship) factors inform differences in the digital media use of the participants. At the same time, their practices are linked in the ways that both groups negotiate these practices within the Global Care Chain, the moral economy of the mediated household and social media affordances within the digital economy. Using an intersectional lens (Crenshaw, 1989; Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020), we present three dimensions through which intertwining factors mould the participants’ digital practices: gendered care practices and identities, transborder care and citizenship and digital/moral economies of care.

Gendered care practices and identities

Digital media and online channels are key in shaping the care practices and identities of the participants: Australian-born women and older Filipina-Australians. However, we also note that disparities in people’s social, economic, and political backgrounds determine mediated practices of care and their outcomes.

Both the Australian-born women and the older Filipina-Australians engaged in a range of care practices through social media channels, as unpaid labour. The Australian-born women initially used blogs to forge social connections prompted by the isolation of being primary carers for young children and wanting to share their experiences of domestic life. They later moved to Instagram to build their online audiences. This was part of a commitment to care that this group of women wanted to make visible as a central defining feature of their online and offline lives and identities and in some cases, to monetise their social media presence and creative products to earn income. But for older Filipina-Australians, who are typically retired and spending most of their time at home, Facebook was used to visibilise self-care and therefore act as a form of care for distant family members and relatives who are spared from worrying for their health and wellbeing.

During the fieldwork, each of the Australian-born participants lived with a partner or husband and children. Some continued to have more children while others had their older offspring leave home. All the participants were in the throes of child rearing. This was an important topic in their posts and the discussions that took place in the comments sections first in their blogs and then on Instagram. Family duties were frequently raised in social media posts prompting conversations about the work of mothers and the need to recognise the value of their labour at home. These conversations, which were previously considered part of the private sphere, conducted with family and close friends, therefore became part of a wider public dialogue about social responsibilities for care interspersed with images that celebrated domestic life.

The children at times became the focus of the women’s posting, for example, Christina, who lived in a capital city, started a blog when she left the workforce to have a family. She initially posted about her crafting and jewellery design but shifted to providing detailed insights into her experience of home-schooling her children. Through these, she revealed to her audience various forms of domestic and creative labour she undertook that were unpaid. In the posts below (Figure 1), Christina inspired her followers with an artfully arranged image that includes vintage crafting tools, sprigs of rosemary and a rustic platter of eggs (left). She used the accompanying text to detail her home-schooling experience while at the same time encouraging readers to buy tickets to her upcoming photography workshop. In the image from 2019 (right), Christina discussed the inspiration she finds in vacuuming her home and how domestic chores stimulate her creativity. She used the images to make visible her connection to the home and demonstrate her gendered identity as both a stay-at-home carer and creative professional.

Figure 1.

Screenshot of Instagram posts 2018 (left) and 2019 (right).

Christina’s representation of her position as simultaneously working and caring for her children feeds into a broader narrative of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ encouraged by governments and employers and increasingly normalised in the digital sphere (Duffy et al., 2021). In this case, women juggle caring for their families while utilising digital tools to undertake micro-enterprise activities, which on the one hand, offers the hope of reconciling incompatible work and childcare demands while on the other, results in a position of precarious self-employment in the creative sector (Luckman and Andrew, 2020). Also at stake are the private lives of women whose shared performances of domestic life increasingly became the content their audiences were most interested in consuming, as opposed to engaging with their craft practices. Their labour in the home was becoming more visible but the craft bloggers were also investing considerable time and energy to document their lives (Duffy and Sawey, 2021).

For older Filipina-Australians, Facebook was used to mobilise and visibilise self-care to enable social care from within the home to family and friends in and beyond Australia. Facebook is considered the most commonly used platform in the Philippines (Kemp, 2023). The older Filipina-Australians used digital media and online channels to sustain interests and hobbies and share certain aspects of their domestic life in Australia to family and friends in the Philippines. These online channels have also been utilised by the Filipina-Australians to mobilise interests and hobbies – their status as retired, access to health and welfare services, and for some, continued engagement in work, provides the basis for exploring and sharing different aspects of their lives. Some participants keep themselves busy and entertained by working on a creative hobby. The output is posted on Facebook, a space through which multiple networks see and engage with. For the participants, visibilising activities provides a means to showcase their vital subjectivity and productive citizenship in later years and is a mode of maintaining connections through such performativities.

For instance, during fieldwork Jona, the 70-year-old Filipina-Australian, talked about her hobby – crochet. On free days, Jona revealed in the interview that she enjoys crocheting while sitting in the living room and watching television on her smart TV (See Figure 2). She also added that she usually posts a photo of the finished items, which her friends often commented on, ‘They say, ‘Oh my God! It’s very beautiful. How did you do that?' or ‘The colours are pretty!’. Many of them commented that what I made was beautiful, and I used a rainbow colour. Then I say, ‘This is only my free time while I’m watching television’. When Jona was asked how she feels about the way people engage with her post on Facebook. She said, ‘I feel happy. For me, I’m just giving them motivation, too, in a way, but it depends upon the person. They see me as working. And in my mind, they can say, ‘Oh look at Jona, she has the time to crochet.' But this one is for me. It’s like a hobby. It also adds to my knowledge by counting, to avoid dementia. The ability to do some counting and you feel about what you finished’.

Figure 2.

The photo uploaded to Facebook (left) and more in-progress works (right).

Jona’s practice is a form of relational care practice. By highlighting her good health status on Facebook, she reassures her distant networks that there is no need to worry about her (Baldassar, 2007; Cabalquinto, 2022; Margold, 2004). Furthermore, she does not only reproduce the familial and gendered expectations of the household on Facebook. In a way, as argued by McKay (2007), the curation of positive experiences overseas enables their distant networks to cultivate and aspire for the generative outcomes of migration.

Transborder care and citizenship

The two groups of women negotiated norms and expectations of care and citizenship through performances of the home in the context of external forces and pressures such as systems of support, economic conditions and educational opportunities. These performances are no longer bound to the physical site of the household even as they derive their value from and are often the source of display as women’s private domestic lives are broadcast across public channels. Older Filipina-Australian women use digital media to negotiate these outside pressures and sustain and extend the moral economy of the household with ties to family abroad. They enact transborder forms of care and citizenship by staying in touch with their family members and peers while also supporting the national economy in their countries of origin. This is evident in the remittances sent by migrant Filipinos. In May 2023, cash remittances from overseas Filipinos reached USD12.98 billion (Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, 2023), and this figure contributes to ten percent of the Philippines GDP. Indeed, the transnational flow of messages, products, services, and money disrupts assumptions of the home bound to particular nation states or orders.

In the study involving Filipina-Australians, Gigi, a 71-year-old participant, mentioned that she has been a supportive family member to her siblings and their family. She branded her role in the family, in her words, ‘I’m the mother to them and father to them already’. As the eldest, she has ten siblings, with seven left. She shared that she supported them, ‘I helped them when they needed from school. I didn’t have a favourite that only this person I will support. All of them, I supported them when they needed it’. Gigi’s statement illustrates the transnational practices of Filipina migrant women who send remittances to support the needs of distant family members and relatives (Cabalquinto, 2022; Parreñas, 2020).

However, Gigi’s obligations of financial support also extended to transfers of care made in-person with visiting relatives. In conducting the visual methods, one striking photo that Gigi talked about was with her niece who was vacationing in Australia (see Figure 3). In the photo posted on Facebook, Gigi and her niece were enjoying a big serving of seafood. When asked why Gigi posted the photo. She said, ‘So the mother can see that I brought her daughter out! So, they won’t say that her daughter was bored’. Importantly, posting the photo on Facebook serves as visual evidence of performing care in an extended Filipino family setting. In doing so, Gigi demonstrates her enactment of a transnational identity that provides in-person care and can be understood as conforming to a moral economy of transnational reciprocal care – ensuring the niece is being well looked after and having an enjoyable and valuable experience during her visit.

Figure 3.

Gigi with her visiting niece in a restaurant.

In the study of the craft bloggers, the women established new kinds of communities based on the sharing of their crafts and domestic care practices on Instagram. They extended the moral economy of the household by creating ties with audiences of mostly women who engaged in conversations about domestic life and built relationships based on their common interests. These interests included crafting activities such as knitting, sewing and crochet, which were initially the focus of the posts. But as audiences became invested in the lives of the bloggers seeking out details about their homes and their lives, this also influenced the women to document the everyday, which had become a central part of the moral economy of their extended online community. As Christina said about her goals for posting: ‘It’s about craft, it’s about inspiration, it’s about documenting and then it’s about those little everyday moments’.

Throughout the research period, the craft blogger participants occasionally mentioned working outside the home but mostly their stated occupation was caring for their families. As their circumstances changed – relationship break ups, children moving out, moving interstate – there would be mention of jobs or lack of work, but for the most part each remained committed to their families and craft practices ahead of outside employment, although most continued to seek out ways to leverage their digital practice to create income or pursue validation for their creativity (Gregg, 2011; Luckman 2015; Orgad 2019).

Through the documenting of their performances of domestic activities, the craft bloggers attempted to make visible the value they placed on home life. But this also doubled as professional work directed towards addressing their online audience. Their dual roles as social media identities and family carers became intertwined as they utilised digital tools to undertake micro-enterprise activities (Luckman, 2015; Luckman and Andrew, 2020). The posts on their blogs and Instagram often highlighted personal life stories that could be connected to narratives of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and productive mother which perpetuated the complex negotiation of competing accounts of care and citizenship. Such narratives persist in maintaining unequal gendered relations of care and social reproduction in society at large and support the long tradition of women who are willing to undertake the work of the home with little recognition for their labour (Casey and Littler, 2021).

Digital/moral economies of care

Another aspect of the articulation of the moral economy of the household through online performances of the home is the way that it intersects, in sometimes contradictory ways, with the digital platform economy. This is apparent through, for example, the metricisation of social relations and the promotion of a connective friendship model framed by the logics and affordances of social media (Marwick and Boyd, 2014; Van Dijck and Poell, 2013). This section presents how the two cohorts of women navigate social structures and care chain tensions through the appropriation of technological features in the context of efforts to maintain intimacy at a distance, create intimate and safe communal spaces and in some cases, build a source of income from their social media audiences.

The group of middle-class Australian women established new kinds of communities of women based on the sharing of their crafts and domestic practices using the affordances of digital platforms. They extended the moral economy of the household by creating new ties with audiences of mostly women who engage in conversations about domestic life and build relationships based on their shared interests. For these participants, Instagram was particularly conducive to this widening of their circle because of the platform’s visual focus and communicative features linked to visual representations and stories. They made use of likes and comments to build engagement with their audience but were less inclined to take up the role of more conventional influencers who post to develop an income stream based on commercial relationships (Duffy and Sawey, 2021; Leaver et al., 2020). These intimate depictions of domestic life were strategically deployed to elevate the standing of care work in their homes. In Figure 4 Ellie, a mother of 3 who lived in regional NSW, shares an image of a bundle of naturally dyed fabrics, encouraging her audience to pause and appreciate the careful work that had gone into making them. As their audiences grew, this aestheticisation of care and creativity became something that followers aspired to emulate, providing the craft bloggers with opportunities to convert their social media following into paid employment as they ran courses to teach their skills.

Figure 4.

Screenshot of Instagram post 2017 highlighting benefits of crafting and a slower lifestyle.

As the Australian crafters moved most of their posting from individual blogs to Instagram between 2016 and 2018, the women developed clear ideas and strategies about how to address their audiences across multiple platforms, using their blogs and Instagram accounts to tell different versions of their stories. For example, Ellie found herself with more than 100,000 followers on Instagram after her photographs were featured by the platform on its ‘suggested user’ list which showcased smaller creators in the early days of the platform before the shift from chronological to algorithmic feeds (Leaver et al., 2020). Ellie leveraged her increased follower count to build an audience for her online courses where she taught ‘traditional crafts in a modern way’ encouraging participants to also join her regular community chats.

The features and affordances of Instagram allowed for communities to grow as the connections and experiences of audience and crafters were mutually shaped by the architecture. Unlike many social media influencers who profile their personal brands and individual lifestyles (Duffy and Sawey, 2021), the online practices of the women crafters displayed and prioritised domestic life and practices of care for others – their children, their home environment and their community of followers. Performing care practices in the household often demands re-adjustments to accommodate the feelings of others and sustain relationships as it is an ongoing social process (Nguyen et al., 2017). For some Australian women, ensuring a safe and intimate networked space for like-minded audience was achieved by linking their blogs and other accounts to develop a distinct social media ecology and moral economy that expanded as they sought out new places to share their domestic crafts, and in some cases, to earn an income from these activities.

But for older Filipina-Australians, as a form of care practice, Facebook was used to post content that did not make precarious distant family members and relatives feel uncomfortable. For the older Filipina-Australians, the affordance of the platform was appropriated to make visible certain information informed by moral structures. For instance, Sarah, the 73-year-old Filipina-Australian, used Facebook as part of her everyday life. However, she avoided posting photos of her houses in Australia. This is under advice from her children. For them, the act of not posting is about the morality of avoiding making people uncomfortable. She explained, ‘My children always tell me not to put things that make people uncomfortable’. Instead, she opted to post photos of her activities, such as dancing with peers and her grandchildren having fun. As she reiterated, ‘Cause you make people uncomfortable especially if they’re struggling’. During the interview, Sarah talked about how she supported her family members and relatives in the Philippines. She sent boxes to her sister and relatives in Ilocos, one of the regions in the Philippines. When asked why, she said, ‘Because I feel I got things here and life is so hard back home, even though I don’t receive pension because I got houses and I put so much money in my super’.

These practices take place within the distinctive platform features and affordances of Facebook. Participants make strategic decisions about what representations of their life and home is shared and visibilised, while simultaneously avoiding depicting certain aspects of the home which have the potential of unsettling their audience. This can be understood as an act of relational sensitivity that some social media users perform and internalise as an outcome of the ‘interpersonal surveillance’ that the social media platform facilitates (Trottier, 2016). In this case, the relational sensitivity enacted through digital practice is also structured within the broader relational networks and expectations of transborder care and the moral economy of the household that incorporates transnational family expectations.

Conclusion

This article has underlined the crucial role of digital and social media in enabling women from differing backgrounds to forge connections among their diverse networks in Australia. These connections form the basis of practices of mediated care that reflect the ways that groups of women perform the home in the context of globalised hierarchies of domestic labour and social reproduction – or the Global Care Chain. In this regard, we have shown how the moral economy of the mediated household impacts the performance of care and sociality across diverse sites and groups. Importantly, we have illuminated the tensions in digital spaces, which are often shaped along gender, class and cultural lines.

In the case of Australian women, an online platform such as Instagram has paved the way for communities of creative practice to develop over a shared interest in domestic life. Their documentation of everyday creative endeavours in the home unmasks ongoing tensions that exist around the visibility and value of certain kinds of labour carried out in the home such as housework and childcare. The women associated with the new domesticity movement leverage social media, with a certain privilege they have economically and socially, to extend their influence beyond the home while also creating opportunities to derive income from their home-based craft activities. Through their use of social media, they elevate the meaning and significance of their domestic experiences as they make visible their caring responsibilities and intimate spaces of the home in the public sphere. Significantly, women’s focus on prioritising family life through the representation of care practices on social media demonstrates the highly gendered nature of women’s roles in the new domesticity movement (Matchar, 2013). For older Filipina-Australians, Facebook has allowed them to care for their distant family members by displaying content that reassures their networks of their health and wellbeing, prove their financial support to family members, and filter unsettling images and messages. By diving deep into the everyday connective practices of older Filipina-Australians on Facebook, we see the influence of the moral obligation to care transnationally, either emotionally or financially.

The article compared the ways differing groups of women in Australia use and integrate digital technologies and online channels in their everyday personal, familial and social lives. A key contribution is revealing how the moral economy of the mediated household extends beyond the physical site of the home to distant family and community members in digital and transnational spaces and is one of the ways that the globalised care chain is negotiated. We have shown how the home functions as an extendable and symbolic site of display to perform and negotiate feminine identities, transnational citizenship and connective relations. We have also applied an intersectional approach in a new way to locate and expose the differing factors shaping communication practices of a range of social actors and networks in digital spaces within global care chains. Third, we have exposed how the increasing volatility and pressures to monetise on social media platforms raise questions about the viability of online communities based solely on sharing domestic life. Lastly, we have contributed to the definition of the home in a digital era by connecting performances of the home to its expressions by different groups within the Global Care Chain. The studies have interrogated the mediated home through a moral lens, diving deep into the practices and relationships entangled in online media use by different groups of users.

In conclusion, this paper demonstrates the changing role of the home and how different groups of women use social media to negotiate the moral economy of the household across physical and digital spaces. We show how women use digital technologies and social media channels to re-shape our understanding of the home through the curation of feminised identities, transborder care and citizenship, and social connections using social media affordances within digital platform economies. Thus, the mediated home is no longer solely the domain of the physical occupants. Instead, whether it is the extended family of the Filipina-Australian women or the audience members that follow the Australian craft bloggers, the privacy of the home can no longer be assumed and is itself a curated performance.