We focus on the ways in which ‘pity’ was generated, mobilized, and transformed into indignation against the Iranian state by digital activists.
Drawing on the literature on the politics of pity, we explore the creation of a global icon, the #BlueGirl, draw attention to the gendered elements of Sahar Khodayari’s iconization, and take a closer look at the mobilization of affect mechanisms set in motion. The article suggests that the politics of pity rests on a chain of erasures that deprive the pitiable other of their agency, history and historicity, and erase the global conditions that contribute to the suffering of the former, thus, localizing responsibility and instituting western moral hierarchies.
Mobilizing pity: the dialectics of narrative production and erasure in the case of Iran’s #BlueGirl
(in Globalizations - a journal dedicated to opening the widest possible space for discussion of alternatives to narrow understandings of global processes.)
