"Not Appearing as a Villager" and Monetizing Villagerness: A Feminist Digital Media Ethnography in the Villages of Malkara (Tekirdag,Turkey)
ILEF DERGISI, cilt.13, sa.1, ss.189-227, 2026 (ESCI)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 13 Sayı: 1
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.24955/ilef.1892986
- Dergi Adı: ILEF DERGISI
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
- Sayfa Sayıları: ss.189-227
- Hatay Mustafa Kemal Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Drawing on a three-month feminist digital media ethnography conducted in the summer of 2022 in the villages of Malkara (Tekirda & gbreve;, Turkey), this article brings the experiences of village women, frequentlypositionedatthemarginsofcommunication scholarship, into analytical focus. It examines how women construct forms of subjectivity through digital media practices, approaching these formations as relational processes entangled with class, gender, spatiality, and regimes of everyday labor. Based on participant observation, in-depth interviews, and both offline and online encounters, the study centers on a specific analytical tension: the conditions under which villagerness is aestheticized in digital spaces, strategically withdrawn, or rendered convertible into economic value. On the one hand, women attribute symbolic and material value to their labor, articulating claims to dignity against the socially and culturally marginalized representations of the village woman. On the other hand, they negotiate which images of villagerness are considered "shareable," navigating the historical stigmatization and classed expectations attached to rural life. Digital media thus emerges as a relational site where both re-claiming and distancing oneself from villagerness operate simultaneously. Rather than producing a singular, stable figure of the village woman, digital platforms make visible a plural field of subjectivities in which different femininities, different configurations of villagerness, and unequal power relations intersect. Accordingly, this article approaches villages not as "lagging" or "deficient" spaces of digitalization, but as analytically generative contexts for rethinking technology, temporality, space, and subjectivity. It contributes to media and communication scholarship by advancing a situated and relational ethnographic perspective against text-, platform-, and interaction-centered approaches; by proposing a technofeminist framework that conceptualizes digital media as a dialectical field of power beyond the binary of emancipation and domination; and by challenging disciplinary assumptions grounded in urban experience, rethinking research in rural contexts as both a theoretical and spatial intervention.