Contested Visibility: Mapping Mediation Opportunities in Iranian Digital Feminist Activism

Abstract

This article examines how Iranian feminist activists navigate the ambivalence of digital visibility: strategically appropriating platform affordances to contest gendered inequalities and circulate feminist counter-narratives, while confronting the constraints of visibility under patriarchal authoritarianism. It engages critically with Bart Cammaerts’s mediation opportunity structure and proposes to de-Westernize the framework—developed to analyze protests in liberal democratic, “Western” polities—to capture how feminist protest repertoires achieve the status of media spectacle in authoritarian contexts. Drawing on a comparative frame analysis of five Iranian feminist hybrid mobilizations between 2017 and 2022, I argue that digital visibility allows embodied vulnerability, a condition of gendered precarity under patriarchy, to function as both a constraint and an opportunity. This dynamic unfolds through two distinct protest repertoires that I term the collective witnessing of individual vulnerability and the collective witnessing of collective vulnerability. In confronting a political terrain marked by state surveillance and coercion, misogynistic backlash, discursive delegitimization, and geopolitical co-optation, activists perform embodied vulnerability as a mediation opportunity and a mode of feminist political resistance.