How Are Migrant Nanny Identities Materialized on Social Media?

A New Materialist Analysis

Abstract

Social media platforms are potent sites of advertisement, promotion, and communication in Türkiye’s migrant nanny market. While parents resort to social media accounts of recruitment agencies to find a nanny, agencies compete to attract clients by posts featuring nanny candidates. Nannies too form their own online social networks to share experiences. Captured by the diversity of posts featuring manifold nanny identities, this article investigates social media’s role in producing unstable identity categories. Most conceptualizations in digital media literature follow a representational rather than performative approach to identity and undermine matter’s role in identity production. Following a new materialist perspective, we contend that digital materializations of nanny identities are dynamic boundary-drawing practices, producing fluid identities that construct, confirm, disseminate, or subvert dominant social and cultural norms. Adopting Karen Barad’s posthumanist performativity formulation and analyzing social media posts and interviews reveals that physical settings, images, and captions actively materialize fluid nanny identities.