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Paper short abstract

This project aims to analyze women entrepreneurs' online subjectivity, informed by success imaginaries and historically situated gender regimes. By an ethnography of women's online practices and dream-selling events, I explore how online aspirations shape new subjectivities amid economic precarity.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to investigate the case of Iranian women’s online home-based businesses as a response to the condition of inclusion and exclusion following the Islamic Revolution. While the rise of online entrepreneurship is considered as the result of the neoliberal economies, 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. This includes the link between women’s online entrepreneurship and their imaginations of success on social media. To delve into entrepreneurial aspirations for economic inclusion, I conducted a digital ethnography of women’s self-presentation on Instagram. I also participated and observed women entrepreneurs as they move from home as a workspace to dream-selling events and conferences, in which action plans and strategies for becoming a successful entrepreneur is discussed. Adopting a gendered approach to understanding what women aspire to, and how they strive to create a plan of action to realize these aspirations, this project aims to analyze women’s labor on social media, shaped by the platform affordances, success imaginaries, and historically situated gender regimes. Examining the various gender regimes that are affecting Iranian women’s entrepreneurial labor, this paper seeks to discuss the economic and social relations that come together on social media to induce new strategies for fulfilling the belated aspirations. How do digitally mediated success narratives cultivate particular hopeful lifeworlds and subjectivities? How do women negotiate the gap between platform-induced aspirations and the constraints of informality, economic precarity, and gendered exclusion?