MEDIATING, MEDIATIZING, OR DATAFYING IRANIAN WOMEN’S STRUGGLES? IMPERIAL FEMINIST CAMPAIGNS, THE ECONOMIES OF VISIBILITY, AND SUFFERING OF OTHER WOMEN

Abstract

This research explores the tensions in the work of an Iranian diasporic feminist campaign and the techno-social affordances of social media and data-driven platforms for (lack of) recognition and (in)visibility of feminist activism. Situating this study within the sociopolitical context of diasporic feminist activism, I look at the 2017-2018 #WhiteWednesdays hashtag campaign on X, launched by a New York-based journalist and women’s rights advocate, which invited women to post photos of themselves walking unveiled or wearing White headscarves. This campaign, using the Orientalist trope of the veil and aligned with imperial feminist discourses (Ahmed, 1992), gained heightened visibility in popular media, particularly American mainstream news. The research draws upon datafied recognition and visibility (Campanella, 2022) to explore how the campaign’s practices are distributed, under which logics, and with what consequences. I employ digital ethnography and trace the campaign’s life on Twitter and in Farsi-speaking sponsored popular outlets and the American mainstream news to argue how liking, retweeting, sharing, and commenting are social media practices implicated in the platform’s dynamics of recognition, attention, and visibility. These practices imply a particular type of sociability marked by the process of datafication, heavily influenced by high demands for branding and personal visibility, commodifying the suffering of the Other women, transforming violence and injustice into spectacles that generate profit, and erasing the voices from the margins. Yet, such regimes of visibility (Campanella, 2024) are also ambivalent. They can simultaneously go either way: inclusion and exclusion, visibility and erasure, co-optation and resistance, imperialist and radical.