Queering Iranian Diasporic Cyberspace, Critiquing the Conditions of Belonging Available to Purchase

Sima Shakhsari's Politics of Rightful Killing is the first queer feminist monograph on the Iranian diaspora, a much-needed contribution to a growing body of scholarship examining the culture, politics, and identity of Iranians living primarily in the West and their relationship to those living in Iran. As Shakhsari illustrates, debates over how Iranians should intervene in the geopolitical and ideological battles between the United States/West and Iran rely on gender and sexuality as markers of legitimacy, authenticity, modernity, backwardness, and the right to rights. The polarizing US-Iran conflict structures diasporic politics, exerting tremendous pressure to align oneself with either one side or the other. Debates over the best way out of this dangerous standoff, in which millions of Iranians are punished with devastating sanctions and threatened with war, mobilize notions of civil society, democracy, and freedom that have been developed in a neoliberal, post–Cold War context. Women's rights, gay and...