Invisible Work, Digital Solidarity: Gendered Emotional Labor and the Organization of Care in Indonesia

ABSTRACT WhatsApp has become a crucial yet understudied digital space through which women sustain practices of care, solidarity, and knowledge exchange in under‐resourced mental health contexts. In Indonesia, where women disproportionately shoulder responsibility for caring for family members with schizophrenia, caregiving remains emotionally demanding, structurally unsupported, and socially undervalued. This study examines how a semi‐private WhatsApp group of 35 female caregivers, affiliated with the Indonesian Schizophrenia Care Community (Komunitas Peduli Skizofrenia Indonesia, KPSI), functions as an informal infrastructure for caregiving, mutual support, and knowledge sharing. Drawing on 18 months of digital ethnography and reflexive thematic analysis, informed by feminist care ethics, emotional labor theory, and postcolonial perspectives, the study identifies five intersecting themes: gendered burdens, emotional economies, infrastructural absence, digital solidarity, and silenced knowledge. The findings show how caregivers use WhatsApp to coordinate care practices, redistribute emotional labor, and collectively develop experiential knowledge in response to institutional gaps. By conceptualizing caregiving as a relational and digitally mediated infrastructure, this study contributes to feminist media and organizational scholarship by highlighting how care, affect, and knowledge are collectively sustained in contexts of uneven mental health governance.