Abstract
A reader chancing on this book may well be tempted to think that its subject matter concerns the involvement of women and specifically housewives in the production of user-generated content in the digital media environment. Yet, this is not what Jarrett had in mind; rather, the term ‘digital housewife’ is meant to describe the voluntary work of various actors – both men and women – who ‘express themselves, their opinions and generate social solidarity with others in commercial digital media while, at the same time, adding economic value to those sites’ (p. 4). Jarret deploys this term as part and parcel of a Marxist feminist theoretical framework which she believes is particularly suitable for capturing the peculiar nature of voluntary, unpaid labour that forms the basis of exchanges in the social networks of digital media. While the application of Marxist approaches to the analysis of digital media and digital labour has by now become well established, insights from feminist thinkers have rarely been integrated into such analysis. Jarrett rightly points out that this omission of the feminist framework is rather surprising, particularly given that much of the labour performed by digital prosumers is closely similar to the forms of domestic labour examined by feminist theorists: it is unpaid, voluntary, often affective, immaterial, exploitative and yet also socially meaningful and individually enriching. This characteristic ambiguity of digital labour – its exploitative nature yet also social importance – is rarely acknowledged in existing literature, and Jarrett makes a persuasive case for mobilizing the framework of Marxist feminist scholarship to make sense of the contradictions that are at the heart of the contemporary digital media world.