Posting the Self

Yadlin-Segal, Aya. “What’s in a Smile? Politicizing Disability Through Selfies and Affect.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol. 24, no. 1, 5 December 2018, pp. 36–50, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmy023.

Twitter users often resort to political satire and absurd humour as a form of catharsis or a way to cope with global turmoil. Although Tran and Rauchberg specifically investigate “hopecore memes” as “sensemaking practices that attempt amelioration of the unknown,” I expand their claims to include absurd and farcical political memes outside of the hopecore genre. Specifically, I draw on Twitter memes about the death of the Ayatollah on February 28, 2026, to explore how users engage in this sensemaking practice as a form of LGBTQ+ resistance. One Twitter user, in response to the news about the Ayatollah’s death, posted “Please, everyone, the gender neutral term is Ayatollx” (@RennaW). Her tweet pokes fun at the Ayatollah’s death while also satirizing the notoriously intolerant ideologies of the Iranian regime by suggesting that the Ayatollah liked to be referred to through gender neutral terms. Another user retweeted an old homophobic tweet from the Ayatollah to indicate that “homosexuality” has outlived him (@homonoqueer). Such satirical posts are not just humour for humour’s sake. They are markers of LGBTQ+ resistance and a form of cathartic representation for communities of affect, celebrating the death of and demeaning a man who has the blood of thousands of queer people on his hands.

The ongoing internet blackout in Iran, which began in January 2026, gave rise to hashtags and phrases such as “#BeTheirVoice” and “Be his/her voice.” These hashtags address and mediate the same issues surrounding visibility and acceptability that Poletti raises, such as “what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need[?]” and “what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding lives in this way?” (Butler qtd. in Poletti 11). Poletti also raises “the urgent ethical and political question of why it is that the exposure of some populations to death is considered an acceptable political reality” (12). Social media users use the phrase “be his/her voice” to draw attention to the voicelessness of Iranian citizens while also participating in a form of political resistance against the Iranian regime. These hashtags often accompany the names of executed or to-be-executed victims of the Iranian government. Attaching the phrase “be his/her voice” to photos of political prisoners and providing their individual identification underlines the global and moral responsibility of viewers to acknowledge Iran’s violation of human rights, witness the humanity of the victims, and confront their personal understanding of who deserves representation and whether they are willing to accept the fact that these victims deserve visibility and representation. “Be his/her voice” forces the viewer to confront their positionality and decide whether to continue being a spectator to or a participant in value-making.

In these images from the 2026 Iranian massacre, the cameraman becomes a stand-in for the voyeuristic viewer, watching a victim being mourned by a loved one. Baym and Senft introduce the concept of the voyueristic spectatorship of the selfie, where the “viewers are always secure in the knowledge that they can stare as long as they like, never to be caught themselves in the camera’s gaze” (1954). Voyeuristic and detached spectatorship of images of “victim selfies” or images of war and violence reproduces the “notion that victims exist only as ‘bug splats’ (a term for drone photographs of killings) in public memory” (1957). The uncomfortable angle from which the attached photos were taken — often from behind the griever — feels like walking in on an intimate, private moment in which the viewer does not belong. This angle holds a mirror to the detached viewer, resulting in emotional discomfort that creates an opportunity for affective witnessing. These images confront the voyeuristic viewer to acknowledge the humanity of victims by witnessing how their loved ones grieve them. The potency of such images does not come from the shock of gore, but from the emotions of the griever, combined with the defamiliarizing effects of the camera angle.

The ongoing 2026 Iranian massacre sparked a brief trend where the diaspora of Iranian women posted a photo of their younger selves in Iran, wearing compulsory hijab, and a photo of their current selves without the hijab, expressing their authentic selves. This is an example of a “community of affect,” which is a “socio-political structure that promotes marginalized groups’ negotiation of collective identity and communal action geared towards cultural, social, and political change” (Yadlin-Segal 36). These photos stood out to me because, as one of the interviewees belonging to another community of affect in Yadlin-Segal’s article points out, “‘we all look related’” (41). We do! The hijab works as a unifying symbol, marking how we have suffered through the same political, religious, and gender-based oppression. These are my sisters from my motherland. This type of familial rhetoric and emphasis on blood ties to Iran and each other has become common due to the massacre, as thousands of families lost their loved ones, they began to pour their love and support into the young people who are fighting to avenge their deaths. This is a political and sociocultural approach to finding a unified identity by creating intimate bonds within the community and practicing resistance.

“Affective witnessing” is an embodied form of witnessing (Richardson and Schankweiler 237), interlinked with media depictions of “violent attacks or human rights violations” (238). The death selfie is a powerful example of a media form that necessitates the practice of affective witnessing. The “death selfie” refers to “selfies unknowingly taken before death, selfies of death where the taker’s death is almost witnessed [,] and selfies with death where the taker stands by while someone else dies” (Hjorth and Cumiskey 168). The last selfies of Siavash Shirzade and Ahmad Ashiri are both selfies before death and of death, as they both died shortly after taking these photos. Politically-charged death selfies are powerful because, as Richardson and Schankweiler state, “‘history and memory, too, become accessible through the body rather than through written records’” (245). The physical gesture of selfie-taking, as explained by Frosh, further invites viewers to participate in affective witnessing (Frosh 1623). As a result, participating in the affective witnessing of death selfies renders the image a site of resistance against cultural and political erasure. 

Social media has become an integral platform for resistance for Iranians because it is the only resource they have to share the realities of life under the Islamic Republic. In January 2026, the regime cut Iran’s internet to massacre over 50,000 Iranians. Although Iranians claim the numbers are higher, it is hard to statistically confirm these numbers because we will never know the number/identities of the people who were murdered, abducted, threatened into silence, disfigured, executed, and/or imprisoned by the regime. Social media serves as a digital graveyard, containing the last moments of protesters’ lives. Here, I focused on selfies because the hand motion/gesture of taking a selfie creates a sense of intimacy, highlighting “the physical potential and constraints of the human body” (Frosh 1612) and the “position of companionship” between the viewer and subject (Frosh 1617). The gesture of the selfie humanizes the subject by drawing attention to the body while also creating a sense of intimate connection between the subject and the viewer.