Although the vloggers in my study acknowledged that greater visibility on their part could make their channels more popular, they prefer not to show themselves immediately, or at least until they have reached a certain number of followers to bolster self-confidence. In their view, their invisibility in videos does not negate their agency since they can convey their sociocultural values through their online sharing.

Therefore, when a man “keyboard warrior”—to use her term—accused Hacer of being “arrogant” on account of her assertive answers, adding that Allah does not approve of such behavior, she responded with a flower emoji and wrote that she had never been an arrogant person in her life.

After YouTube, when I passed 100 thousand subscribers, I learnt not to wait for approval from anyone. I’m already successful, and I’m doing it well. I got more self-confidence. I’m not passive towards people anymore, not the person who is constantly waiting for approval, but the person who has already received approval. Whether you like it or not, I’m quite in this mood, no lie.

Through the videos, their age, marital status, beliefs, and lifestyles are subject to be interpreted. In Figure 6, for example, Merve holds a tray: in addition to her young-sounding voice, her visible bracelet might lead the audience to an interpretation that she is young.

After posting the video of the healing soup, she was contacted by one of her followers who was an elderly religious woman. Since she felt a connection to Nergis, the woman wanted to visit and in fact stayed at Nergis’ home for two days.

r example, Nergis has been criticized in the past for wearing long sleeves instead of showing her forearms on the basis that her clothing is likely to come into contact with the food. Although Mualla, wearing a shalwar and “başörtüsü,” rolls up her sleeves while cooking in a village garden—illustrated in Figure 5, some of the comments on her vlogs refer to her as a “peasant” for her alleged lack of hygiene.

However, she did not hesitate to share a photo of her mother online (Figure 4) as norms for covering in Islamic understanding are less strict for elder women (Sevinc, 2021).

Wearing a hijab, she speaks in the Istanbul dialect with a flat and neutral tone of voice because she ascribes to the Islamic belief that a woman’s voice can be seductive to men

or example, when Tenzile had first begun vlogging some 6 years prior to the interview, she did not even talk in her videos and only showed her hands alongside text. For her, this discretion was meant as an embodiment of her inner disposition of modesty and piety (Mahmood, 2005, pp. 157–161). At that time, Tenzile felt that talking or showing herself online was illicit (haram) and could cause “fitne,” that is, “disturbance”

Even though she is invisible in her videos, Nazan still felt she needed to pay close attention to her behavior since she is single and has children who might be affected by any behaviors deemed inappropriate on her part.

uch neighborhood gossip greatly exacerbates the difficulties of being a single mother in Turkey.

All of the women vloggers I interviewed described having had apprehensions about producing online videos. These reservations stemmed both from their sociocultural environment and their lack of confidence regarding their tech skills. Although they had social media accounts before taking up their YouTube activities, they did not tend to use these accounts to share their lives because they were concerned about their privacy. For this reason, they all worked hard to control their (in)visibility on the Internet.

Their child-rearing and household chores were additional reasons they gave for seeking home-based work since they could not easily leave their homes for many hours. Vlogging on YouTube thus served as a way for them to generate income by drawing on resources that go unvalued in their daily lives, but which have attained new value in virtual settings.

. For instance, Nazan had developed significant health problems including herniation and depression due to her combined work routine in the service sector and on YouTube after her problematic divorce and the lack of support for her children from her ex-husband:

Only Mualla had a formal cooking qualification. While my participants expressed that, for the most part, they did not receive any support from their relatives or community members until beginning to generate an income, they opened their YouTube accounts either after receiving positive comments on dish photos they shared on their Instagram pages, or based on a woman acquaintance’s suggestion.

Four of the interviewees (Derya, Hasibe, Semahat, and Lale) had never experienced working outside their homes. Except for Nefise and Merve, who expressed being able to read written English, and Lale who has Arabic language skills, none of the participants could speak any language other than Turkish.

Most of them had experienced cross-cousin marriage. Half of the sample are single mothers, one of whom had been widowed and the others divorced and mostly unsupported by their ex-husbands. Except for two women (Nefise and Merve),3 all have only high-school-level education or below

he number of subscribers to the YouTube channels of the women I contacted ranged from 1,000 to 1 million (with a median of 126 K—see Table 2 in the Appendix).

Fashion shows featuring fashion models in slim-fit modest clothes took off and gained popularity. Yet, wearing red lipstick and nail polish in pious fashion was still a taboo as recently as the 2000s (Gokariksel & Secor, 2015, pp. 2590–2591).

Due to the government’s regulation of dress in public after the military coup in 1980, women wearing hijabs were not allowed to attend university and faced barriers entering into public institutions.

eligious clothes and accessories were banned in public in accordance with the principle of “laicism.” As a representative of the modern Turkish nation, women were discouraged from wearing headscarves, as though veiling communicated obsolete values.

According to the Quranic verses, women should behave modestly in public by lowering their gaze, covering themselves appropriately, and eschewing any trappings of glamor. The virtue of piety is gauged according to how a woman’s demeanor embodies humility, honesty, and reverence (Ahmed, 1992, pp. 54–57; Mahmood, 2005, pp. 100–123). T

This is partly because, as Fatima Aziz (2019, p. 136) has observed, “from an Islamic cultural perspective . . . female sexuality is considered more potent than those of males and is therefore highly regulated.” Based on this assumption, a woman’s voice alone is viewed by some as having the potential to arouse male lust (Mahmood, 2005, p. 65), while it is expressly forbidden (haram) for women to invite or return the gaze of any man other than a close male kin member ((a) mahram) with whom marriage would be considered haram (Tobin, 2016, p. 81).

practice of piety.

In contexts in which there is widespread surveillance of social behavior, both on digital platforms and in society, Muslim women need to invest special efforts in impression management online. In constructing their online identities, as Pearce and Vitak (2016) state, they need to calculate the costs and benefits through the use of privacy settings and paying close attention to the social codes prevailing in their environments.

As opposed to other social spaces dominated by men, Lewis (2015) and Piela (2017) point out that social media platforms provide a relatively safe space for Muslim women to communicate with others and curate their own modesty norms. In pursuing this opportunity, Salam (2020) argues that Muslim women vloggers challenge the idea that women belong only in the private sphere.

Turkish Muslim housewives I interviewed who vlog their domestic labor prefer to be as invisible as possible on account of sociocultural and religious concerns. For the same reason, they assume an air of moral detachment in their presentations in place of pursuing intimacy. Their cooking performances in public are conducted in a modest and pious manner. Rather than through their physical appearance, they prefer to exercise their agency through the performance of cooking, narration, and materials on the video. In this way, on the other hand, their (re-)presentations are disputed online in connection with the societal values of Turkey.

Therefore, as my study explores an aspect of “the lives of women whose desire, affect, and will have been shaped by non-liberal traditions” (Mahmood, 2001, p. 203), the performance and maintenance of online self-brands inevitably involve the embodiment of cultural values prevalent within the vlogger’s milieu and their (more or less homogeneous) intended audience. In the case of Turkish Muslim women vlogging their cooking skills, such self-branding efforts include taking great care to not only avoid offending prevailing norms and gender expectations but also to meticulously ensure that their online performances and brands embody the virtues of piety and modesty which are central to Islamic notions of femininity.

All the women in this study defined themselves as “housewives,” including those who were single mothers or divorcees. The average age is 41 and most have limited formal education and few employment opportunities.

Yet, this conceptualization which is predominantly based on how self-branding is performed by women in the West (Gibson, 2019), overlooks the very different ways in which digital media are used by women outside the West and from less advantaged backgrounds, including the role of socioeconomic and cultural factors in their efforts to maintain their self-brands. In sum, prevailing accounts of women’s self-branding on digital platforms have neglected to consider diversity in social positionalities.

n extolling “can-do” and “always-active-and-productive” woman role models, postfeminist discourses urge women to self-brand themselves through “mediated intimacy” which also engenders them to compete for attention on digital media platforms (Banet-Weiser et al., 2020), “offering [their] personal lives for consumption by unknown others” (Kanai, 2017, p. 296). These and other findings suggest that being seen as sexually alluring and fashionable is what young women widely want to accomplish

Social media platforms have been hailed as spaces with the potential to amplify marginal voices and thus enhance cultural diversity, including by facilitating individual empowerment through self-branding.