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ID:
168831
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| Summary/Abstract |
What is the power of social media in defining and policing sexual identities and bodily expressions, and what are their connections to understanding nation, power and self in authoritarian contexts? Through the study of popular Instagram accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia, I argue that these sites serve as spaces of visualization and re-creation of new forms of ‘acceptable’ behaviour and lifestyles, that on the one hand may lead to new globalized visions of sexual identity and the body while on the other promoting localized conflict and resentment online, triggered by online users’ fear of losing their ‘national culture’ in these global trends. While many resort to policing gender norms and heteronormative body images online, influencers and Instagrammers from Russia and Kazakhstan take an active part in resisting these frameworks and categories.
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| 2 |
ID:
187989
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| Summary/Abstract |
What if a museum is not built out of cement and stone, but codes on a virtual space? In what ways do virtual platforms operationalise the concept of a museum? The paper explores these questions based on the empirical case study of Museum of Material Memory (MMM) and how it operates on Instagram. To this end, the objectives of this paper are twin fold. Firstly, it investigates the characteristics that make MMM a museum as distinct from a social media blog or a website. And secondly, it explores the politics of curation in relation to conventional physical museums in conjunction with issues thrown up by Instagram as a medium of display. The paper argues that MMM’s virtual mode of operation challenges the methods of heritage conservation envisaged by museums by demonstrating how tangible heritage can be museumised through virtual means. In doing so, MMM lays emphasis not only on the object per se, but also on the relationship that the object may have with its setting and the people around it. Such a model of display democratises expertise by obfuscating the difference between producers and consumers of heritage.
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| 3 |
ID:
173950
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| Summary/Abstract |
In Iran, the politically sanctioned discourses of embodiment and body management are based on binary notions of gender and sexuality. These discourses are contested by social trends that reflect political dissent. This article uses a combination of content and visual analysis of three Instagram profiles dedicated to fashion to answer the question: ‘Is queer fashion present in Iranian cyberspace’ and if so, ‘How does it persist against the existing queer-phobic political forces?’ The article explores aesthetic and fashion categories called ‘duffs’ and ‘puffs’ that offer queer embodied extravaganza in Iranian cyberspace, which is a more relaxed geography of morality and leisure in comparison with offline public spaces. The analysis includes duffs and puffs’ life style and performance that entails excessive deployments of femininity and masculinity, and exploration of their political significance and potential to undo gender norms in Iran. While they do not explicitly reject heteronormativity and/or capitalism, their non-participation in the conventional modes of money-making, and their erotic and sexual performance contributes to transformative politics. They offer antagonism to the normative power of mainstream gender and sexual ideologies by staining their heterogeneity through performances of fun, shock and failure.
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| 4 |
ID:
185907
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the Manichaean discourse of the radical-right populist parties, both religion and gender play a role in the discursive process of ‘othering’. At the same time, on some occasions, populist discourse also mobilises Christianity and gender equality against immigrants, which has been interpreted through the frames of hijacking or instrumentalization. In this paper, I advance two arguments: first, I illustrate the relevance of the literature on secularisation to finetune the analysis of the entanglements of populism, religion and gender, to overcome the ‘hijacking’ frame; second, I make a plea for a socio-constructivist perspective, which pays attention to how the actors make sense of their religious-political engagement and try to avoid paternalistic interpretations. Empirical analysis focuses on the discourse of the supporters of Matteo Salvini, the leader of the Italian radical-right populist party Lega Nord, on Instagram, showing the intersections of religion and gender.
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| 5 |
ID:
186517
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