Performing home through women’s care practices in digital spaces

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.