ABSTRACT
From the beginning, feminism was bent to shatter stereotypes and create a new vision of womanhood in the mainly male-dominated society. One important endeavor of feminism has been to oppose the objectification of the female body. In the male-dominated culture, femininity is mostly associated with young -and sexy- body of the female object. Surprisingly, in the past decade or so, we have witnessed a new wave of feminism which contradictorily tries to appeal to the old notion of the objectified young sexy female body in order to fight the very phenomena of oppression and objectification of the female body. In this study, I will have a review of four Iranian feminist pages on Instagram to show that femininity in these pages is mainly limited to young, beautiful, and sexy women. It seems older women (20% of female population) and even young women in bad living conditions who consist a majority of women in the society are systematically omitted from these pages just because this networked feminism perceives them not appealing to male audiences.
Keywords: Pornography of Feminism; Feminism; Male Gaze; Critical Sociology; Iran; Instagram
Over the past decade, Iranians have shown a great deal of interest in different social networking sites and platforms. After Telegram was blocked by Iranian authorities in 2017, more than 40 million telegram users looked for an alternative, and many of them migrated to Instagram. Instagram was launched in October 2010 as an image-sharing service and has gained popularity ever since. In December 2014, Instagram had over 300 million users worldwide and, in September 2015, 400 million people in the world had a presence on Instagram and shared photos and videos (Russmann & Svensson, 2016). As of summer 2020, Instagram has a user base of more than 1 billion. As Instagram is currently not filtered in Iran, the number of Instagram users has always been on the rise in Iran. Now there are more than 24 million Iranian Instagram users -roughly 30% of Iran’s population. Maybe the Iranian authorities thought that the depoliticizing and consumerist nature of Instagram content will lead Iranian users to non-political spheres.
It is true indeed, but only in the short run. As soon as the users adopt the logic of consumerism, they would come back with financial requests, which the country cannot satisfy as it is economically fragile and under the heaviest sanctions (see, for example, Shahghasemi (2017) and Shahghasemi and Prosser (2019)). This would lead to other social discontents that might harass the government and this is why I think their idea was not a good one. Moreover, Telegram is mainly a text-based platform while Instagram is image-based. This means a Telegram user should first translate written words into a “meaningful” code before consuming it, while an Instagram user directly consumes the image contents Instagram provides. Therefore, Instagram content frees the brain from the burden of continuous work and this is exactly why we like Instagram wandering more than book reading.
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