Women Entrepreneurs as Vloggers: Turkish Beauty YouTubers in the Context of Simulative Labor

Vloggers and content producers have become famous by being active on platforms, such as YouTube and Instagram, which are essential components and mainstays of today’s internet usage practices. In this context, YouTubers and content producers have become the most striking figures of virtual media in recent years, while beauty phenomena reach many followers and influence large audiences. With these aspects, the phenomena become the subjects of women’s entrepreneurship activities and form a new type of virtual/digital entrepreneurship. On the other hand, the labor exerted by the phenomena while applying different practices to aestheticize the body in their videos can be conceptualized as “simulative labor.” Based on this argument, this research aims to analyze the way of constructing simulative labor in the activities of beauty vloggers as virtual female entrepreneurs. In the context of the study, the videos of Duygu Özaslan and Danla Bilic, two of the beauty phenomena with the highest number of followers in Turkey, were subjected to content analysis within the scope of the qualitative research method. The main finding of the research is that both entrepreneurial beauty phenomena have become icons by performing simulative labor. However, the female identities represented by the icons produce simulations that differ significantly from each other