CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Elham Mohtashamzadeh |
|---|---|
| Title | The Girls of Enqelab Street: Media Representation and the Question of Collective Identity |
| Summary | The Girls of Enqelab Street (GES) is one of the most important protests in the history of women’s social struggles in post-revolutionary Iran. This thesis analyses the specificities of this protest by drawing upon Alberto Melucci’s model of new social movements and Asef Bayat’s conceptualization of Iranian women’s social movements, ‘nonmovement. One of My main concerns is to investigate the ways in which the protest’s collective identity is constructed. I suggest that GES has a ‘semi-virtual nature’ which makes it susceptible to be appropriated by different social and political actors. I use ‘semi-virtual nature’ to refer to the ways in which GES, albeit inadvertently, extended its public reach through social and political discourses that are being formed across different media platforms. Given the GES’s ‘semi-virtual nature’, this research demonstrates the ways in which the protest is represented in media outlets inside and outside Iran. I intend to show that the protest’s politics of representation in media ignores the rich diversity among the GES’s women actors. In order to do so, I examine media texts from the selected mainstream media outside the country, BBC Persian and online Iranian state-run media, Khabaronline. For the analysis of the media texts, this thesis has deployed discourse analysis and close reading. Discourse analysis of the media texts has been conducted based on Norman Fairclough’s approach laid out in his book, Analysing Discourse. Furthermore, since the protest was initially spread and named through social media platforms, GES’s representation in social media is briefly analysed through the hashtag themes in Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Finally, by investigating the published interviews of the protest’s three women actors inside and outside Iran, Shaghayegh Shajarizadeh, Azam Jangravi and Narges Hosseini, I aim at showing how diversity of motivations and emotional involvements among these women actors could potentially complicate the way we think about women’s activism in today’s Iran. |
| Supervisor | Barát Erzsébet |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/mohtashamzadeh_elham.pdf |
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