Week 6 Post

Sima Shakhsari’s article entitled, Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in diaspora, presents several interesting critiques of the current predominant representations of Iranian bloggers. She dispels the idea that Iranian women are undergoing a sexual revolution due to the proliferation of the internet, arguing that Iranian women have been not only talking about sex in public spaces but have also been very active politically before the proliferation of the internet. She also discusses the way in which bloggers are subject to gender discourses where men are seen as gaining political freedoms and women are seen as gaining expressive freedoms. Lastly, Shakhsari illuminates the ways in which Iranian bloggers are implicated in a discourse of neoliberalism, revealing the ways in which that implication affects the currency of the bloggers.

What is particularly interesting about Shakhsari’s piece given the context of this course is the way in which she ties knowledge, neoliberalism, capital, and subjectivity together. Shakhsari argues that neoliberalism works to create a market value for all social actions, and that Iranian bloggers were implicated in that system (10). Here, she argues, “authentic” knowledge of Iran becomes marketable and in using that knowledge to obtain capital gain, the types of narratives that get picked up within mainstream media is limited and often presented through gendered discourse. This example adds to Said’s discussion about the relationship between knowledge and power. In this way, the knowledge that these bloggers possess become cultural currency (and often translate into monetary currency) when placed within the context of the ‘war on terror.’ Thus, in choosing to market the knowledge one possesses, these bloggers obtain a certain amount of power.

While this article works well to complicate the representation of the Iranian blogosphere and its relationship with discourses of neoliberalism, I would have liked to have seen more on the concept of the term “Weblogistan.”

Sima Shakhsari. 2011. "Weblogistan goes to war: representational practices, gendered soldiers and neoliberal entrepreneurship in the diaspora." Feminist Review, vol. 99: 6-24.