Best of both worlds or refusal to comply? The rich kids of Tehran on Instagram

ABSTRACT

This article offers a textual analysis and semiotic reading of the Rich Kids of Tehran's (RKOT’s) Instagram page. Contributing to scholarship on Iranian youth media practices, this article interrogates how the RKOT navigate urban and rural space to engage in everyday processes of resistance against global and local systemic oppression. Grounding their visual representations on Instagram in historical and cultural context, the author questions how and when quotidian actions are transformed into political transgressions when posted on social media. This article emphasizes the RKOT's agency in shaping their brand by analyzing representations of gender performance, intertextuality, and national identity on Instagram.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• Iran
• gender
• resistance
• global youth

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Radhika Parameswaran and Dr John Brooks for the suggestions and edits that they provided me with while composing this article.

Notes

1 I presented an earlier version of this article at the 2016 International Communication Association Conference on the Popular Communication panel, “Social Media: Identity (and) Politics.” No other versions have been published or presented elsewhere.

2 As of April 2019, the RKOT's Instagram page remains open to the global public. Iranians have to use a virtual private network to access Instagram.

3 All of the images were originally downloaded on April 15 2016 from the RKOT’s Instagram page, but some were downloaded again later.

4 Many women wear a chador in Iran, a large piece of cloth that covers the entire body except for the face, or they wear a manteau and a rosarie, a more fashionable coat and scarf that can show some of the woman's hair.