Takhayyul Seminar “Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender and Sexuality in weblogistan”

Sima Shakhsari is an associate professor in the Department of Gender, Women & Sexualities Studies at the University of Minnesota. They are the author of several articles and a book titled Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan (Duke University Press, 2020.

Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan, is an online and offline ethnographic account of the Iranian blogosphere in the first decade of the new millennium. The book traces the ways in which Weblogistan, as a part of the transnational Iranian civil society, became a site of cybergovernmentality, wherein the desire for democratic futurity relied on heteronormative digital citizenship. Notwithstanding the aspirations for exceptional citizenship through practices of democracy online, however, the possibility of exceptional citizenship was foreclosed for the willing Iranian blogger subjects/entrepreneurs, as they belong to a population that is subjected to the politics of rightful killing.

Date: 17th March 2021

Time: 16:00 BST

Zoom link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/99880721630

Meeting ID: 998 8072 1630