Veering away from totalizing assumptions of digital authoritarianism, this article theorizes China's Great Firewall as a porous digital border, showing how ordinary users employ virtual private networks (VPNs) to access blocked platforms in their everyday lives despite an entrenched censorship regime. Grounded in critical scholarship on digital borders and Internet studies, this article draws on thirty-two semi-structured interviews to examine the complex processes, experiences, and meanings of everyday VPN use. It shows how digital border-crossing through VPN use simultaneously challenges and reproduces the bordering logic underpinning the Chinese Internet, and how authoritarianism is rearticulated in fragmented, non-totalizing, and embodied ways.
This paper is interested in one mode by which the NCAA discursively manages its population of student-athletes in response to the legal and cultural shifts of the contemporary Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) landscape: namely NIL Assist, the NCAA's mediated support platform created to aid student-athletes in navigating the NIL environment. I argue that through the NIL Assist platform, the NCAA continues to evade employer-employee labor relations by positioning student-athletes within neoliberal economic subjectivities. Mobilizing discourses of personal brand and opportunity, the materials of NIL Assist invite student-athletes to become entrepreneurs of the self. Ulitamtely, I characterize and addresse the critical moment of shifting labor relations in college sport as a signpost of increasingly neoliberal understandings of value, labor, and the self.
This article examines the #MahsaAmini protests through the lens of political aesthetics, vulnerability, and feminist resistance. Drawing on feminist theory, affect studies, and Middle Eastern scholarship, it analyzes how Iranian women's embodied acts of defiance confront the state's aesthetics of cruelty. Focusing on Instagram as a key semiotic battleground, the article shows how women's bodies became sites of political poesis. Using semiotic and digital ethnographic methods, it traces visual and affective motifs in protest media. Situating Iranian feminism within transnational frameworks while preserving its specificity, the article highlights vulnerability and collective action as transformative forces against authoritarian power.
This article intervenes in debates on subalternity by examining the unique case of N & uuml;shu ((sic)(sic)), the only known women-exclusive language system. The study argues that N & uuml;shu's "(un)translatability" functions as resistance, shifting the question from Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" to "Can we in the mainstream possess the capacity to hear them?" N & uuml;shu's (un)translatability challenges translation-based understanding, urging attention to cultural practices and their epistemic strategies. N & uuml;shu reconfigures language by transcending communication, challenging the oral-written hierarchy, and unsettling the relationship between symbolic systems and power.
