University of Tehran on behalf of the "Cyberspace Research Policy Center" and the "UNESCO Chair on Cyberspace and Culture: Dual Spacization of the World" Journal of Cyberspace Studies 2588-5499 4 2 2020 07 01 To Wear or Not to Wear the Hijab Online (A Study of the Identity Performances of Muslim Canadian Women on Facebook) 81 100 76746 10.22059/jcss.2020.296193.1045 EN Fatemeh Mohammadi Assistant Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Allameh Tabatabai University, Tehran, Iran Journal Article 2020 01 19 This paper looks at how Muslim women with an Iranian background and now living in Canada perform their identity through wearing the hijab. This was achieved by observing the behavior of six members of this community on Facebook using Erving Goffman’s stigmatization theory. The observation reveals that women who wear the hijab are more likely to identify themselves as Muslim-Canadian while those who have abandoned the hijab after immigration are more likely to identify themselves as Iranian-Canadian. Moreover, the results show that while Goffman’s theory is very useful in trying to understand the stigmatization of the veil after the 9/11 attacks as well as other extremists’ attacks, the pressures that this created on Muslim women, as well as the behavior of some women in dropping the veil in order to ‘pass’ such stigmatization, his theory is of limited use in understanding the more complicated performance of women who kept their hijab in spite of the challenges they faced. https://jcss.ut.ac.ir/article_76746_6d71b4abf1dd192c518f2768cade0301.pdf