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Abstract
Over the past decade, Iranian networked feminism has had to navigate ascriptions of inauthenticity, of individualism, of ties to imperial agendas. Women’s bodies, in these polarised debates, have - once again - served to mark the territorial boundaries between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, most notably in the feminist movements focusing on the compulsory hijab. In this talk, rather than seeking to determine which digital feminist movements or performances are authentic, I examine how Iranian feminist subjectivities are affectively performed and produced, focusing on the practice or affordance of territoriality. The notion of the digital realm as a territorial alternative for Iranian feminists and activists is present in the two-decades-old term ‘weblogistan’, yet what are less often attended to are the ways in which Iranian feminist protesters draw on territorial practices and attachments, spanning online and offline spaces, to authenticate their claims to be ‘of’ the nation, and thus to contest the national terrain with the state. In focusing on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, I explore its staging of the ‘people’ as territorial imaginary. In the field of feminist media studies, conceptions of the ‘popular’ as a political terrain tend to steer away from naming and thinking the ‘people’ as political subject, or exploring how feminist and popular subjects might co-constitute each other. The popular, I aver, features primarily in the dominant feminist media scholarship as an attenuated quality that largely serves to contaminate, or render problematic, networked feminisms. My interest is otherwise: I am interested in the popular as the name for a history, an imaginary, which is both expansive and limiting, liberatory and exclusionary; I focus on the popular as a figure that inspires for its binary logic of Us versus Them, the ‘people’ against the state, yet which can also foreclose possibilities of solidarity through that same binary logic. The popular is a figure with which feminism must reckon, especially in the global South. I strive to show how that process of reckoning is embodied and made visible in the online visual, textual and aural artefacts of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising.

Bio
Sara Tafakori is an Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research explores the intersection of feminist and postcolonial theory, affect theory, and media and cultural studies, with particular focus on digital affective practices in (post)colonial contact zones and their role in creating new political spaces of appearance, alternative archives and revolutionary imaginaries. Her work critically examines the problematics of constructing feminist solidarity.
She received her PhD in Middle Eastern Politics from the University of Manchester and has previously held Postdoctoral and Teaching Fellowships at the University of Edinburgh, Max Weber Foundation, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She completed her MA in Gender Studies at SOAS and her BSc in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Tehran.