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Paper Short Abstract:

Using social media for running businesses is on rise among young women in Tehran, Iran. With an ethnography of online entrepreneurial activities, I show the embeddedness of online businesses in between women's marginality as a structural condition, as well as material and nonmaterial value creation.

Paper Abstract:

My research investigates Iranian women’s online home-based businesses as a response to the condition of inclusion and exclusion following the Islamic Revolution. Even though users’ entrepreneurial activities on social media have been identified as being exploitative, Iranian women’s narratives show a different story. From their point of view, Instagram can provide them with an opportunity to overcome socio-economic restrictions, including high rates of unemployment and gender segregation in the job market. While the rise of “entrepreneurship” is theorized as the result of the neoliberal economic restructuring, close anthropological attention to the phenomena points to a variety of value regimes that account for both the expansion of women’s online businesses and their struggles. In my project, analyzing the emergence of new forms of economic activities that are justified to be more suitable for women is a key. Through contextualizing women's entrepreneurship in the history of development and empowerment plans, I will document the embeddedness of micro-enterprises in various value regimes, material, or non-material, competing, and forming the possibilities for social action. Moreover, this project understands Iranian women’s online businesses as livelihood projects and focuses on “making a living” instead of “exchange” in analyzing online entrepreneurship. Through an analysis of what women entrepreneurs aspire to, and how they strive to create a plan of action to realize these aspirations, this project aims to understand entrepreneurship as a socially embedded activity that cannot be theorized without considering the specific arrangements between “public” and “private” patriarchy under a certain gender regime in Islamic Republic.