Contested visibility: Iranian diasporic feminism and platformed mediation of liberation struggles

This project examines how Iranian feminist struggles against the compulsory hijab have been mediated, circulated, and contested across a decade of diasporic digital activism, and how these struggles have become embedded within platformed regimes of visibility shaped by imperial geopolitics, affective economies, and digital infrastructures. Through an analysis of three key moments (1) the My Stealthy Freedom Facebook campaign (2015–2016), (2) the #WhiteWednesdays and #GirlsOfRevolutionStreet movements on Twitter/X (2017–2018), and (3) the dissemination of #MahsaAmini during the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising on Instagram (2022–2023), the dissertation argues that digital visibility is not a neutral resource for feminist liberation, but a historically contingent and politically ambivalent terrain through which recognition, authority, and legitimacy are unevenly produced. Drawing on theories of imperial feminism and economies of social media visibility, I show how platform architectures and metric incentives reward spectacle-oriented, individualized, and emotionally legible narratives of women’s rescue, which enable the consolidation of spokesperson authority and the circulation of imperial feminist narratives. At the same time, the project foregrounds the counter-hegemonic interventions of grassroots and anti-capitalist feminist collectives in the diaspora, particularly Feminists for Jina, whose practices of refusal, collective activism, and insurgency repurpose visibility toward anti-colonial feminist solidarity beyond protagonism and spectacle. Methodologically, the dissertation combines digital ethnography, descriptive network analysis, critical discourse and visual analysis of social media artifacts, and in-depth interviews with feminist activists in Iran and across the diaspora. By centering the structural ambivalence of platformed visibility, as its simultaneous capacity to enable resistance and expose struggles to appropriation, surveillance, and geopolitical capture, this project reframes Iranian digital feminism as an ongoing struggle over mediation, affect, and feminist meaning. Ultimately, it argues that feminist liberation cannot be measured by visibility alone, but by the collective infrastructures of care, accountability, and anti-imperial resistance that can create meaningful structural change and that endure despite the dominant regimes of visibility.