Producing the “We” in High-Risk Online Activism: Identity Configurations in My Stealthy Freedom
研究高风险在线社会运动My Stealthy Freedom（反对伊朗强制戴头巾）如何在不同社交媒体平台上产生集体身份，并构建理论模型，对理解高风险行动中的集体感产生机制有贡献。
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.