Vlogs as a tool of self-presentation: An analysis of the online self of female home vloggers

Through vlogs women earn income while fulfilling the domestic responsibilities imposed on them within the framework of the gendered division of labor, and turn their unpaid domestic labor into wages through user labor and data production. In addition to the possibility of obtaining tangible outputs in the face of the impermanence of domestic work, home vlogs are a site of expression where women convey their feelings and thoughts, and a way of establishing multifaceted and intimate communication ties with their communities of followers/viewers. Opening up housework, family relations and the home as a space to digital public scrutiny creates a kind of in-between space where practices that remain within invisible and private boundaries become visible. In this multi-layered field, the study focuses on the reconstruction of female home vloggers' online self-presentations on the basis of a series of conflicts and compromises with unstable discourses, their demands and efforts for self-realization as well as the acceptance of social norms, their economic and social expectations, and the appearance of housework, houses and objects in vlogs as factors carrying performative and symbolic meanings. In the study, qualitative content analysis was applied to a monitoring pool created from the content of 14 mainstream home vlogging channels, and digital ethnographic methods were also used to observe the vlogosphere.