Digital Feminism beyond Nativism and Empire: Affective Territories of Recognition and Competing Claims to Suffering in Iranian Women’s Campaigns

There has been a growing affective intensity on Farsi social media around Iranian women’s rights protests, particularly mobilizations against the compulsory hijab. This crystallized into variety of emotions: anger, joy, and defiance women protesting hijab inside country; outrage at injustice these actions communicate; anger anxiety critics both Right Left, among establishment ordinary people. Yet oversimplified counterpositions between “global” “local,” West East, dominate legacy-media social-media narratives campaigning, resulting, as I show, in circulation binary genres “authentic” versus “inauthentic” protest that generate anxiety. In this vein, traumatic experience economic sanctions, master signifier West-East conflict online exchanges, often frames human discourses inauthentic, are positioned emanating from West. Understanding politics emotion allows one to attend more closely contentions fissures traverse struggles within Iran and, argue, develop recognition basis for constructing feminist solidarities across borders. A focus rage, other feelings, helps us not only trace oppositions characterize protests but capture their unstable ambivalence authenticity inauthenticity, outside, potential point beyond existing boundaries demarcations, permit new imaginings territoriality.