Instagramming Persian Identity: Ritual Identity Negotiations of Iranians and Persians in/out of Iran

• In Event: Narrating Voice and Building Self on Digital and Social Media

Abstract

Instagram, as a visual, social media space where users can curate their various identities has shifted the way users engage with one another online. This paper attends to the way images impact meaning produced in and through digital engagements and digital rituals. Through an analysis of the way young women inside and outside Iran create, disseminate, and mediate Iranian and/or Persian identity across boundaries, this project explores the nature of a curated meanings and identities produced and cultivated online and the possible effects these media artifacts have on embodied subjects, particularly those living in Iran. This transnational making of images highlights the way Instagram is the creation point of the fluid female icon, whose status changes and shifts with the contingent nature of everyday life as an Iranian and is predicated on the contingent nature of the photograph.

Author

• Samira Rajabi, University of Pennsylvania