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Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora

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Feminist Review

Abstract

In this article, which is based on twenty four months of combined online and off-line ethnographic research, I show the way that some Iranian diasporic bloggers use their weblogs as entrepreneurship resources during the ‘war on terror’. Through a discourse analysis of a documentary film about Weblogistan and interviews with diasporic Iranian bloggers in Toronto, I argue that Weblogistan is implicated in discourses of militarism and neoliberalism that interpellate the representable Iranian blogger as a gendered neoliberal homo oeconomicus. The production of knowledge about Iran in transnational encounters between the media, think tanks, policy institutions and the Iranian diasporic self-entrepreneurs, relies on gendered civilizational discourses that are inherently tied to the ‘war on terror’. Following feminist scholars who have theorized militarism and gender, I argue that dominant representations of Weblogistan produce different gendered subject positions for Iranian bloggers. Although the masculine blogger soldier takes freedom to Iran through his active participation in proper politics (enabled by his freedom of speech in North America and Europe), the woman blogger finds freedom of expression in writing about sex and telling the truth of her sex in a confessional mode. It is in this war of representation that women bloggers negotiate their subjectivity while shuttling in and out of local and global politics, as subjects of politics (markers of freedom and oppression) and political abjects (not worthy of political participation).

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Notes

  1. See http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl/2004_3736967/on-iranian-blogsno-mask-isneeded-sites-feedhung.html. Last accessed 14 July 2011.

  2. For examples of this genre, see Alavi (2005); Amir-Ebrahimi (2004). Also see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci/tech/2044802.stm; http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2004/dec/20/iran.blogging; http://www.atlantic-community.org/index/Open_Think_Tank_Article/%22Weblogistan%22_Key_to_Democratization_in_Iran; and http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/03/06/iranian_bloggers. Last accessed 14 July 2011.

  3. See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article782133.ece. Last accessed 14 July 2011.

  4. See Duncan Riley's article, ‘The Blog Herald Blog Count October 2005: Over 100 Million Blogs Created’, Blog Herald, 10 October 2005. http://www.blogherald.com/2005/10/10/the-blog-herald-blog-count. Last accessed 14 July 2011.

  5. The Telecommunication Company of Iran (TCI) reports the number of Internet users to have increased from 8,800,000 in 2005 to 27,500,000 in 2010. See the TCI report, ‘A Year after Privatization,’ at http://tci.ir/s40/page5.aspx?lang=fa. Last accessed 14 July 2011.

  6. Blog statistics cited above are estimated based on language indexing methods. For a critique of available blog statistics and issues of accuracy, see Khiabany and Sreberny (2007).

  7. Because of Canada's ‘Professional Visa’ programme, which attracts a young generation of computer savvy Iranian immigrants, Toronto has a large number of Iranian bloggers.

  8. Akhavan's dissertation research (2008) sheds light on the complicities of Iranian bloggers and state nationalist discourses.

  9. Although many bloggers whom I interviewed travelled to Iran without being arrested or interrogated, the post-2009 presidential elections has definitely made it more risky for many to travel to Iran.

  10. For an excellent analysis of the implication of social networking in militaristic projects, see Caren Kaplan's ‘The Biopolitics of Technoculture in Mumbai Attacks’.

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Iranian bloggers and friends in Weblogistan who opened their online and off-line homes to me during my fieldwork. This essay is based on a chapter of my PhD dissertation, the funding for which was provided by the Department of Anthropology at Stanford University, the Mellon Foundation, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences Graduate Research Opportunity Grants. I am grateful to Nadje Al-Ali, Lizzie Thynne and anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback. My special thanks to my dissertation committee members, Minoo Moallem, Miyako Inoue, Hamid Dabshi and James Ferguson for their insightful comments, and to Shay Brawn, for her careful reading and helpful suggestions. All omissions and errors are my sole responsibility.

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Shakhsari, S. Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora. Fem Rev 99, 6–24 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2011.35

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