Sex, spectatorship, and the "Neda" video: a biopsy

The video of the murder of Neda Agha-Soltan, released at a time when people around the world were desperate for coverage of the protests, quickly became an Internet sensation. As Joe Joseph of London’s Sunday Times put it, the Neda video ‘marked the moment when Iran’s repression emerged from the forest of newsprint and became personal’. Oxford University has established the Neda Agha-Soltan scholarship at Queen’s College for their graduate program in philosophy. Her death has even inspired an NGO called The Neda Foundation, dedicated to ‘raising international awareness of Iran’s human rights violations and providing succor for victims’. Witness the recent HBO film in which Neda was repeatedly referred to as an ‘ordinary girl’ who liked music, dancing and makeup. As Social Text blogger Nicolas Mirzoeff notes, stories like Neda’s have ‘always circulated in the margins of political violence’. For Iranians in the Islamic Republic, Neda’s smallish nose wouldn’t signal whiteness, but would probably signal urban wealth.