The Digital Bahdala: Recoding National Humiliation Across Postrevolutionary Lebanon And Egypt

This dissertation analyzes three transnational social media scandals in the postrevolutionary contexts of Egypt and Lebanon. It offers these as cases of digital bahdala, or the didactic performative mode and state of humiliation, embarrassment, or shame which utilize the affordances and imaginaries of digital media platforms. It examines the rhetorical techniques, performances, and symbols used by transnational publics on three different social media platforms around these scandals. It finds that audiences engage in recoding, or the cultivation of alternative feeling states, to repair national imaginaries which are exposed as incompatible with a cosmopolitanism which was once promised. It also finds that activists can leverage the digital bahdala and its reliance on digital affordances meet demands for national accountability in exploitative labor conditions. In doing so, it offers digital bahdala as a diagnostic for a national belonging which is threatened but which carries the potential for repair.