Sentence
Shakhsari: In From Homoerotics of Exile to Homopolitics of Diaspora: Cyberspace, The War on Terror and the Hypervisible Iranian Queer, Shakhsari suggests that the Internet presence of Iranian queer people and the discourse around these individuals represents a younger more tolerant segment of the Iranian diaspora, who have been able to mobilize due to the shift from exile to diaspora as well as the media representations of the war on terror.
Response
Sima Shakhsari presents an analysis of the discourse about queer people in Iran and their presence on the Internet specifically through the use of blogs. The analysis of the discourse Shakhsari provides is quite interesting because of the way it the author’s argument is structure. For example, much of the article discuses how generations of young Iranians all over the world are becoming more technologically savvy and with that they have become more tolerant of various spectrums of sexuality as opposed to older generations of Iranians who may not be as technologically sound or educated which has impact that demographics view of homosexuality. Interestingly, toward the end of the article and the conclusion Shakhsari suggests that despite this tolerance, many people still view the world in a heternormative way. I thought this was important because I saw the article from the beginning explaining how representations of queer Iranians are improving because of the internet, however in the end it seems like this presence has become somewhat stagnant due to the tolerance that still defines queer Iranians as “other.” One thing that I would be interested to know more about is censoring in Iran and elsewhere (specifically Turkey) where Shakhsari explained many queer Iranians fled. I wonder if this sort of censoring controls the information on the blogs that Shakhsari criticizes in this article.