This paper presentation focuses on the digital circulation of a series of nineteenth-century photographs of an Iranian Qajar princess, Esmat-o-Doleh (Qajar dynasty from 1848 to1896). I am currently working on these photos as a case study for my doctoral dissertation. I look at the aesthetics of their circulation and temporal representation. I study the digitization of these images in relationship to specific historical moments that matter to transnational Iranian communities and their identity formation. I argue that the reanimation of history through digital archiving is a way for Iranian transnational subjects to deal with difficult heritage and negotiate their cultural identity and social memory. I study these photographs “as performance[s]” (Schechner 32) that challenge the constructed-ness of Shahzadeh/princess in a cross-cultural imagination, and consequently entail feminist scrutiny of the production and reproduction of their subject. I employ a hybrid methodological framework combining performance as an epistemic lens alongside archival research, historiography, and cyber ethnography to firstly explore the fascinations of the nineteenth-century court with the innovation of photography, and secondly to trace the transformation of this fascination in the viral circulations of the images on social media. My presentation aims to unpack the contemporary (trans)national interest in these photos in relationship to the seemingly non-binary gender qualities of their subject: a heavy-set and -statured royal princess with a mustache and thick eyebrows. For instance, one of these fabricated viral images lays a head-shot of Esmat on the cover of a playboy magazine. I look at how juxtapositions like this entails a performance that transgresses recuperative tendencies of ‘archival consciousness’ and highlights archive as a site embracing its inclination toward its own fiction effects. I study the playful techniques using the fiction effects of archival records in tandem with Anjali Arondekar’s methodological propositions in For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Arondekar argues for a reading of the archival record that productively juxtaposes archive’s fiction effects with its truth effects. In this presentation, I consider archive as both a system of representation and source material with serious consequences in studying these digitized images. This paper further contends that these images, appearing in popular culture and media, produce a telos of knowledge production. Citations: Arondekar, Anjali R. “Introduction Without a Trace.” For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India. Duke University Press, 2009. 1-27. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2006.