Turkish migrant women's everyday experiences of social media: the reproduction of gendered power relations within the conservative Muslim family

This research investigates the adoption, integration and everyday use of social media by married, migrant conservative Muslim women who followed their husbands from Turkey to the UK and live in Sussex. The research is framed as a qualitative case study using semi-structured, in-depth individual interviews with 31 women. It provides an empirical inquiry into the role of gendered familial relationships in the women’s adoption, integration and everyday use of social media and illustrates how these women give meaning to the social media applications that they use. The theoretical background to this research mainly incorporates existing feminist perspectives on gender and technology and responds to the need for further research on the interaction between gender and social media within embodied everyday practices, places and relationships that are found in diverse social and cultural contexts. The research addresses a gap in current knowledge of conservative Muslim migrant women’s use of social media as it occurs in their everyday lives and in the framework of familial relationships. This approach provides a more critical view of the supposedly positive implications of social media use for migrant women.

The thematic analysis of the data identified two main themes and various sub-themes that reveal how, and to what extent, social media have become the principal means of experiencing, expressing, representing and performing gendered familial relations in these women’s everyday lives, and the implications of these relations. The first main theme and its sub-themes relate to familial control over women’s access to, and usage of, social media and to an important associated phenomenon: the digital surveillance culture to which these Turkish migrant women are being subjected by their husbands and remote relatives. The second main theme and its sub-themes address women’s labour of care and women’s performance of emotional labour within the family. More specifically, this main theme covers how the women’s use and adoption of social media in their home lives, domestic activities and performance of gender, under the pervasive influence of conservative Turkish social and cultural mores, is imposing excessive physical and emotional labour upon them, by burdening them with additional onerous responsibilities, and reproducing and perpetuating their existing roles as wives and mothers.