‘Explosions and examinations’: growing up female in post-Saddam Iraq

Abstract

In the aftermath of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqi civilians have witnessed their country descend into profound and often deadly chaos. HNK and Aunt Najma are two young voices from post-Saddam, post-invasion Iraq who write www-based diaries (blogs) on life in post-invasion Iraq. Through their voices, and via the voices of many other Iraqi bloggers, different fragments of the reality of post-invasion Iraq enter the globalised, unruly, digital spaces of cyberspace and create not only accounts of these realities, but what we will call digital selves. We will identify and discuss the selves that HNK and Aunt Najma practise via the use of Michel Foucault's later work on the care of the self and governmentality; and we suggest that HNK and Aunt Najma's digital diaries (blogs) provide a real-time, unfolding, reflexive, and often interactive window into particular life-worlds in post-invasion Iraq, life-worlds that provide glimpses into what it means to grow up female in post-Saddam Iraq.

Keywords:

• digital spaces
• femininity
• fields of possibility
• practices of the self
• post-invasion Iraq