CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Eslami, Elaheh |
|---|---|
| Title | Beyond Exploitation and Empowerment: Aspirational Labor among Iranian Women on Instagram |
| Summary | This thesis explores the ever-increasing inclination among Instagram female users in Iran towards generating revenue online. For many Iranian women, online career has successfully brought micro-celebrity status and financial prosperity. For many others, whom I call aspiring micro-celebrities, an online career is only an aspiration. They have aspired to raise an income but have not achieved it yet. In my thesis, I review the social, political, and economic context within which Iranian women feel the need to promote a business on Instagram. Based on this, I will answer the question of why Iranian aspiring micro-celebrities are convinced to do free and precarious labor in the hope of achieving economic prosperity in the future. As researchers suggest, social media content producers start to do free labor to build a bridge from their existing experiences to their future aspirations. What Brooke Duffy has called aspirational labor is more meaningful in a neoliberal context, in which subjects see themselves responsible for the conditions they live in. Although this form of labor can be found everywhere in the world, it does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it a mere reflection of a neoliberal system. Along with a focus on neoliberalism, I will pay attention to what has marked the context of my study in recent years. To conceptualize these peculiarities, I will theorize women’s aspirational labor as a form of highly gendered digital labor that fills many socio-economic gaps in Iran, mainly by appropriating women’s assumed expertise in caring and communicative abilities. My thesis attempts at theorizing both economic and non-economic values of women's aspirational labor on Instagram. I will draw on Kylie Jarret’s theorization of digital labor as a form of reproductive labor to indicate Iranian women's aspirational labor role in sustaining the sexual division of labor. |
| Supervisor | Claudio Sopranzetti, Eva Fodor |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/eslami_elaheh.pdf |
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