Infrastructures of Feeling: Feminized Migrant Labor and the Postdigital Condition

This article identifies an analytical divide structuring critical scholarship in digital migration studies. While one body of literature foregrounds migrants' everyday cultural practices of digital connectivity, another adopts a political economy and infrastructural perspective that tends to decenter users' agential and transformative capacities. Against this backdrop, the article proposes a feminist cultural materialist approach to the postdigital condition as a framework capable of holding both registers together. Grounding this argument in the conjunctural case of Eastern European low-wage labor migration and data center construction in the Netherlands, it theorizes migrant labor as feminized labor and develops the concept of postdigital dialectics to name the dynamic, contradictory space in which feminized migrant labor is both shaped by and shapes the terms of its own possibility. Drawing on infrastructural studies, critiques of platform capitalism, materialist feminism, critical migration studies, and cultural materialist perspectives, the article argues that migrant subjects appear not merely as users or consumers of technology but as key laboring agents whose everyday engagements with the digital economy occupy emergent spaces of negotiation, resistance, and transformation.