Corona pandemic: Return to Home and Emerging a New Generation of Digital-Housewives in Iran

Abstract

Corona pandemic has suspended two major social institutions in Iran; Traditional institution: Mosques, Holy Shrines, Ramadan and Muharram religious rituals were shut down very soon; as far as modern institutions concerned, i.e. malls, cinemas, Coffee shops, universities, parks and restaurants they faced closure gradually. Instead of these two social structures, other two marginal institutions, internet and home, have taken responsibility to endure the fading social, cultural and even educational affairs. It seems that in intersection of home and internet, there is a “digital woman” maintaining “the social”, which we aim to introduce. This new feminine institution has risen within masculine Iranian tradition and masculine modernization. We use Nematollah Fazeli’s viewpoint about Iranian “none-traditional return to home” in semi-quarantined corona days and his idea about appearance of unprecedented “active home” in the pandemic. We also use Donna Haraway’s “a cyborg manifesto” about the feminine characteristics of mixed human-technology condition, to get qualitative analysis of Persian Instagram content in first wave of pandemic (between March and June 2020). The result implicates the appearance of a new generation of Iranian women, neither a traditional housewife as part of private home; nor a modernized one as part of public street; but a post-traditionalist/post-modernist creative citizen inside “Insta-Homes”, representing an feminine agency which doesn’t fit in the marginalizing borders of traditional and modernist patriarchal structures.

Keywords

• coronavirus
• instagram
• cyborg
• digital-housewife
• cyberfeminism
• iran