Blogging, belonging, and becoming: Cybergovernmentality and the production of gendered and sexed diasporic subjects in Weblogistan

Based on multi-sited online and offline ethnographic research among Iranian immigrant communities in Washington D.C. and Toronto, this dissertation explores negotiations of sexed and gendered diasporic subjectivities in the discursive fields of neoliberalism, nationalism, gender, and sexuality in Weblogistan---the Iranian blogosphere which has gained much attention from the mainstream international media for its assumed liberatory potentials. I interrogate the dominant narratives about Weblogistan which explain the popularity of Persian blogging by representing it as a revolutionary technology that enables freedom of speech in Iran, where state repression has silenced women's voices. To problematize these hegemonic explanations, I ask why so many weblogs that are concerned with homeland politics are written by diasporic Iranian bloggers? Why are many representable and celebrated Persian weblogs written from North America and Europe? How are issues of gender and sexuality discussed in these weblogs? Employing a transnational feminist approach, I situate Iranian diasporic bloggers in relation to multiple and scattered social relations in national and transnational contexts, and argue that despite enthusiastic accounts about its liberatory potentials, during the "war on terror," Weblogistan is a site of cybergovernmentality where the heteronormative disciplining of simultaneously national and neoliberal blogger subjects becomes possible.;This research is informed by a range of interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches. Following cultural anthropologists who have questioned the fixed notions of culture and the field, I extend the notion of the field to include the cyberspace and employ offline participant observation, face-to-face interviews, phone interviews, focus groups, and online participant observation (blogging). I also incorporate a transnational feminist cultural studies approach to analyze weblogs, media reports, books, and films about Weblogistan. The theoretical framework of my dissertation is informed by four bodies of literature: cyberstudies and the anthropological studies of the Internet, studies of neoliberal governmentality, studies of civil society, and the studies of Iranian diaspora.;Drawing on Foucault's notion of governmentality, I define cybergovernmentality as a form of transnational governmentality that involves offline and online discourses and practices, and technologies of normalization and discipline. Within the context of the "war on terror," cybergovernmentality includes state and non-state entities, nongovernmental organizations, corporate transnational media, individual self-entrepreneur bloggers, and experts. By conceptualizing civil society as a correlate of governmentality, I argue that Weblogistan, as a part of what has come to be known as "global civil society," is an element of governmentality.;I analyze civil society as a site of disagreements and conflict and argue that Weblogistan is one of the many sites of transnational Iranian civil society where Iranian bloggers are subjected to gendered discourses of citizenship. Contrary to technocentric approaches that perceive weblogs to have enabled the massive expansion of civil society in Iran, I argue that blogging became possible because of an existing civil society that predates interne use among Iranians in Iran and its diaspora. Furthermore, neither Weblogistan nor other sites of civil society in Iran are separate from the tensions within the Iranian state, the fragmentation of which has opened up spaces where contestations and reform have become possible.;I address the production of the neo-liberal, self-responsible individual in Weblogistan in relation to the project of militarism and argue that as a post-9/11 phenomenon, Persian language blogging is implicated in discourses of militarism and neoliberalism that interpellate the representable Iranian blogger as a neoliberal homo oeconomicus who becomes militarized as a gendered "soldier of freedom" and as an expert in the market for information during the "war on terror." I situate the production and disposal of the Iranian blogger homo oeconomicus in a space between biopolitics and necropolitics, where the politics of rightful killing makes it possible for certain populations to be produced through the discourse of rights and become expendable exactly because of those rights.