I Don't Sell My Privacy; Feminist Content Creators and Affective Labour in Contemporary Iran

My research investigates the blurring line between feminist activism and the influencer creative industry to examine the gendered, sociocultural, and political aspects of Iranian feminist content creators' affective labor. This research focuses on how feminist content creators use social media platforms to express their emotions, talk about their experiences and memories of past inequalities, and imagine a different future.

Another focal point of this research is the intimate relationship these feminist content creators form with their followers through affective labor, emotion-sharing, and the weaving of personal and everyday life experiences into digital content.

The main questions posed by this research are: How do Iranian feminist influencers gain visibility for their activism? How does their labor inform and affect the reconfiguration of the women's movement in Iran, reshaping women's political participation, transforming the prioritization of their political demands, and shaping their collective imagination of the future? This study also examines how platform affordances, entangled with neoliberalism and monetization, influence feminist activism in an authoritarian context like Iran.

This research will draw upon feminist qualitative research methods, including discourse analysis of Instagram and X materials, as well as semi-structured in-depth interviews with feminist influencers both inside the country and in the diaspora.