Producing the “We” in High-Risk Online Activism: Identity Configurations in My Stealthy Freedom

The research on online social movements generally concludes that collective identity, i.e., the sense of we-ness that individual protesters in a movement share, is not only unattainable but also dispensable, even though it is considered a defining feature of traditional movements. In this paper, we explore one of the boundary conditions of these findings, namely the riskiness of protest practices. Analysing the high-risk social movement, My Stealthy Freedom (MySF), which contests compulsory hijab in Iran in a way that hybridizes online and offline protest practices, we show that a sense of collectiveness can be instantiated in online social movements, why it is critical to the success of high-risk activism, and how it is (re)produced. Comparing and contrasting three instantiations of MySF, each of which was enacted on a different social media platform, we develop a theoretical model of how feelings of collectiveness are enacted in high-risk online activism. In addition to providing guidance for online movements where collective identity is desirable, our study challenges prior research on online activism by theorizing the role of embodiment, affect, and the dialectic between activists’ personal and the movement’s collective identity.