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The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

2021; Indiana University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-9306888

1558-9579

Mostafa Abedinifard,

Media, Religion, Digital Communication

An original contribution to the cultural anthropology of the Iranian cyberspace, Sima Shakhsari’s book is a chilling scholarly account of the dark sides of the major Iranian blogosphere, the Weblogistan, often celebrated as a conduit of liberal democracy, as observed during the first decades of the twentieth century. Taking its primary theoretical force from, yet also extending, Michel Foucault’s and Achille Mbembe’s notions of biopolitics and necropolitics, The Politics of Rightful Killing analyzes Weblogistan—that is, the Iranian blogosphere “figured [by many bloggers] as a microcosm of the Iranian civil society with aspirations for a democratic future” (xxiii)—“to explore the role of militarism, ‘democratization,’ and neoliberal governmentality in the Iranian cyberspace” (23). In examining Weblogistan as a site of civil society and its representations of “the people of Iran,” Shakhsari deems both biopolitics and necropolitics insufficient, as they fail to “explain the work of death in relation to populations that are not stripped of rights in the state of exception but whose deaths are sanctioned, rather, in the name of rights and in the state of normalcy” (21). The alternative notion they conceptualize throughout the book for “this form of power over the liminal state between life and death” is politics of rightful killing—a politics that legitimizes Iranians’ death through sanctions and/or bombs, based on the “war on terror” rhetoric. Excluding the introduction and the conclusion, the book includes five chapters. In the detailed introduction, Shakhsari defines their main concepts, clarifies their corpus and methodology, and places their contribution within the studies of the Middle Eastern cyberspace.Shakhsari’s arguments in their chapter are especially provoked by, and shatter, the widespread liberal democratic claim about “the internet as the bedrock of revolutionary movement in the Middle East” and “the internet as the subversive opposite of the nation” (39, 65). This claim, for Shakhsari, “misses the point that Weblogistan and other sites of civil society in cyberspace do not escape forms of governmentality,” including through “gendered forms of normalizing, disciplining, and censorship,” thus ironically recuperating “nationalist imaginations of exclusive Iranianness” (39, 35, 65).In chapter 1, “Weblogistan and the Iranian Diaspora: Nation and Its Re-territorializations in Cyberspace,” Shakhsari explores “how competing and compatible national and transnational discourses in Weblogistan produced normative notions of gender and sexuality that came to regulate gendered subjects” (43). Building on Benedict Anderson’s notion of “nation” as an “imagined community,” Shakhsari shows how, despite its apparently being a deterritorialized online community, Weblogistan indeed served as a site for nationalism that both reproduced and expanded the notion of Iranian nationalism into cyberspace. They support this argument by offering close readings of a few cases, including ethnographic data gathered from bloggers’ online and offline gatherings or interactions (including celebrations, mobilizations, and protests), which, Shakhsari shows, often led to the display of what Minoo Moallen calls “transnational nationalism” (60). Shakhsari’s observations indicate the bloggers’ subscription, despite their varied political tendencies, to the “heteronormative imaginations of ‘Iran’ and ‘Iranianness,’” as manifested through their resort to “gendered, raced, ethnic, and sexed exclusions in a highly celebrated sphere where Iranians were supposed to ‘practice democracy’” (55). In its most striking exclusionary attitude, the typical Iranian diasporic community tends to “aspire an imagined whiteness” especially by disavowing Muslimness and Arabness (66). This is a manifestation of what I call “Iran’s self-deprecating modernity,” as the other side to modern Iranian self’s self-aggrandizing nationalism (Abedinifard 2021). Despite Iranians’ aspirations, however, Shakhsari emphasizes, they become, in the white supremacist imagination, subject to the same “affective economy of fear” as Arabs are (71).In chapter 2, “Civil Society (jaame’e-ye madani), Soccer, and Gendered Politics in Weblogistan: The 2005 Presidential Election,” Shakhsari takes up the case of the 2005 Iranian presidential election, its reflection in women’s rights activists’ actions as well as debates on Weblogistan, to refute the accounts that render Weblogistan as not only the birthplace of Iranian civil society (78) but also a unified site of consensus. Shakhsari shows that “the contentious discussions around the 2005 presidential election did not appear in Weblogistan out of thin air but were rooted in an already-existing transnational Iranian civil society,” including “women’s existing practices of citizenship in postrevolutionary Iran, long before the emergence of Weblogistan” (79). They successfully question the assumption that Iranian women’s activism is “always already secular and NGO-based” (90–91), pointing to the existence of a diverse number of women’s rights activist groups within Iran, from secular to religious, who, despite their opposing worldviews and their—often despised—complicity with the Islamic state, negotiated “a space within the realm of Iranian politics” (89). This diversity, also observed on Weblogistan, is a site of tension. Shakhsari remarks, “Celebrations of Weblogistan as a site of consensus, as a conduit for transnational forms of connectivity that have radically shifted notions of citizenship and community, and as a unified front where civil society flourishes and poses a challenge to the state overlook the manifest ways it is also a site of violent conflict, exclusion, and disagreement” (99). These tensions, along with the erroneous assumption that acknowledges a Eurocentric liberal ethos for feminism of all sorts, resulted in many users’ (including “secular feminists” [92]) abusive chastisement and policing of numerous diaspora Iranians’ claims to Iran, for instance if they showed any interest in religion and/or the state-related affairs on Weblogistan, as well as many articles and books neglecting or misrepresenting the above diversity on Weblogistan.In chapter 3, “Whores, Homos, and Feminists: Weblogistan’s Anti-modern Others,” Shakhsari expands on their argument in the previous chapter by examining “strategies of regulation and discipline imposed by complex international and transnational networks in Weblogistan” (112). To do so, Shakhsari draws on the Foucauldian notions of “technologies of the self” and “the conduct of the conduct” while extending Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” to conceptualize “cybergovernmentality”: “I define cybergovernmentality as a significant method of transnational governmentality that operates through offline and online normalizing techniques, uses diasporas and media technologies, relies on neoliberal economy, and employs security as its mechanism of calculation to discipline and regulate populations according to the ideals of liberal democracy” (113). Shakhsari shows that through a plethora of regulating tools—including “engaging the conduct of the conduct of others through comments, blog posts, and offline interactions”—Weblogistan users, as digital citizens, commit “gendered disciplining” of themselves and others by reproducing “modernist notions of masculinity and femininity” (114–15). In this process, which capitalizes on a rhetoric of “practicing democracy,” users aspire to “exceptional citizenship and a democratic futurity” for themselves and others, which “purges its unwanted excess: the backward and unstable woman” (30). In the Iranian case, and for Iranian queers, for instance, this aspiration manifests itself as one’s “proximity to whiteness, neoliberal entrepreneurship, embodiment of sanitized homosexuality, and the rejection of Islam” (30). A conspicuous feature of this process, Shakhsari shows through analyzing numerous interactions on Weblogistan and through a case on YouTube, is many users’ policing others’ (mostly conceived as women’s) behavior, even subjecting them to verbal violence, based on aspirations to “democracy” as well as a modern/traditional binary that deems “vulgar” and gender-nonconformist behavior as traditional and thus worthy of elimination. Such regulating practices result as well in the production of self-regulating subjects who, no matter how much they aspire to “exceptional citizenship” in a promised democracy, will never achieve it.Chapter 4, as implied in its title, “Weblogistan and Its Homosexual Problem,” continues to expand Shakhsari’s argument about the repressive conduct of the conduct in the blogosphere, this time through its legitimating homophobia in the name of freedom and democracy, as shown through close readings of a series of online interactions among Weblogistan users. Moreover, this repressive discourse vis-à-vis homosexuals is seen among users who express “tolerance” of homosexuality. For these, “tolerance of homosexuality is seen as a progressive gesture that epitomizes one’s readiness for a free and democratic Iran” (152). Nonetheless, this “tolerance” comes with a caveat: “The desire for democracy becomes entangled with tolerating other natural human desires, as long as those desires do not disturb the rational sexual norms that maintain the superiority of homosexuality and the sanctity of the nuclear family. To tolerate homosexuals becomes a democratic chic” (153). Due to this gesture, partly caused by the “desire to appear modern and democratic” and partly because of the “war on terror” market—“where information about human rights abuses in Iran may translate into funding”—Shakhsari argues, the Iranian diasporic opposition groups, who had for long been exclusionary of queers, have now also become tolerant of them (155), even though with limits: they are welcoming only “those [homosexuals] who are complicit with homonationalist discourses that legitimize the ‘war on terror’” (156). This change is in turn informed by a broad discursive “shift from the homoerotics of exile to the homopolitics of diaspora, where the Iranian homosexual is transferred from the position of the lowly abject to that of the representable political subject in transnational realms” (162–63). Among the consequences of this shift to homopolitics, Shakhsari mentions, are the reification of the sex and gender binaries as well as the reproduction and deployment of the “exceptional Iranian homosexual” as “the marker of freedom in civilizational discourses and practices that divide the world into binaries of liberated/repressed, free/unfree, and democratic/theocratic” (163).The final chapter, “The War Machine, Neoliberal Homo Œconomicus, and the Experts,” tells three stories of bloggers and journalists, as Iranian diaspora “self-entrepreneurs,” who in the wake of the “war-on-terror” era served as “homo œconomicus” warriors for democracy and freedom of speech in the “neoliberal democratization market” (181). These individuals, Shakhsari shows, gained significant economic, political, and/or social mobility status via their political participation, often as “native informants” and providers of expertise in Orientalist projects of liberation. Shakhsari deems such projects as a “market” because in them “competition replaces social solidarity, [and] what is valued is not the humanity of the actors or their labor, but the profit that they produce” (181). The cases discussed in the chapter also show how the diaspora Iranians involved in “the knowledge-production industry” focused on the liberalizing power of the internet, and as heralders of liberal democracy for Third World countries, often became disillusioned at some point during their activities, especially when they were no longer useful for promoting the “binaries of freedom and repression” (189). Shakhsari’s cases reveal how, through serving in “war-on-terror” projects, the diaspora Iranians (among others with a Middle Eastern background) “knowingly or unknowingly participated in the war machine” (191).As Shakhsari argues in their conclusion, the naive celebrations of the internet in general, and the “Iranian cyber civil society” in particular, as a tool for and an indication of revolution and/or regime change in Iran, not only does not reflect the on-the-ground realities of Iranian society but also causes the foregrounding in cyberspace of certain topics, such as “sex,” at the expense of other “forms of contestation that are attentive to sanctions, war profiteering, and environmental degradation” (200, 201). If anything, such hopes around internet-brought revolutions, as Shakhsari discloses, have aggravated and delayed any thriving of democratic movements within Iran while also literally endangering the lives of Iranians.While their main focus remains on Iran and Weblogistan throughout their ethnographical project, Shakhsari clearly shows how their argument and conceptualization of the “politics of rightful killing” would be useful in readings of other manifestations of “internet revolution” in Middle Eastern cyberspace, which might similarly be taken to serve as “digital democratization” or “internet democracy-training projects” (24). Mixing an exemplary mastery over theory with rigorous close readings of texts in an understudied area of research, Shakhsari’s The Politics of Rightful Killing is a highly worthwhile read for anyone interested in the subtle workings of power in cyberspace.