This paper explores the contested meanings of the 2009 post-election protests in Iran among different generations of diasporic Iranians online and in North America, as they articulate their Iranian identities. Ethnographic material discussed include interviews with Iranians about their response to the protests in Iran and their decisions on whether or not to participate in diasporic post-election related events and participant observation at various demonstrations. The Iranians interviewed in this study felt a large discrepancy between how they were being represented as Iranians, and their own lived experience of "being Iranian." Related to this, I found that struggles over representing "Iran," or speaking on behalf of/for Iranians, are not struggles within communities or between communities, but a struggle to define community itself--a position from which to make political claims. In my interviews with these actors, it became clear to me that what "Iran" represented on a global scale mattered immensely to their own sense of being Iranian, and related to this, the question of who has the authority to represent Iran globally was a central concern. The history of Iran-U.S. relations was always in the background of these encounters, as was the awareness of Iran as always already globally signified. Actors who are attempting to define a political ground from which to speak always find that pre-existing claims community efface rather than augment their subject position. Therefore, they are constantly engaged in an attempt to define community "on their own terms." But this process always involves responding to existing representations. In this essay I argue that the struggle over representation is not simply a question of contesting pre-existing global images of "Iran," or already-constituted subjects to whom they matter, but is itself implicated in claims to community. In forging communities that refuse the pre-existing subject positions, participants stake a space from which they can make political claims.