Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan by Sima Shakhsari (review)

Abstract

W each popular protest in Iran that makes international headlines, questions about a fissure between Iranian people and the Iranian state reemerge with new force in Western media narratives and policy discussions. Over the past two decades, the role of digital communications platforms in fostering such a fissure has received particular attention. However, claims about the internet’s role have often been informed by bloated techno-utopian hopes, and less grounded in knowledge about Iranians’ digital media practices. Sima Shakhsari’s book, Politics of Rightful Killing, offers a powerful corrective to assumptions about Iran’s web users being a uniform set of political dissidents. Instead, Shakhsari shows us how the Iranian blogosphere constitutes a multifarious communicative space featuring a range of internal political clashes as well as its own dynamics of exclusion, control, and bigotry—often along lines of gender and sexuality. The book draws on ethnographic material elicited through Shakhsari’s participant observation as a long-time blogger in Weblogistan, a term used for the Persian language blogosphere (literally meaning land of weblogs). Alongside the observational material, the analysis foregrounds interviews with key Iranian bloggers the author met in varied diaspora locations. As such, Shakhsari’s discussion is able to seamlessly weave analysis of blog texts and images together with the social dynamics behind their production and the political contexts of their reception. This is the basis on which she makes a convincing case for understanding the thriving Iranian blogosphere of the early 2000s as a significant but vulnerable site of international contestation over the meaning of Iranian