Digital Battlegrounds: Memetic Alliances, (Anti)Feminist Politics, and the Manosphere on Iranian Social Media

Abstract

Through an empirically grounded media-theoretical and digital ethnographic approach, this thesis investigates the rise of the manosphere on Iranian social media, situating it within the broader global digital battlegrounds of the (alt-)right and the growing antifeminist and misogynistic politics therein. Focusing primarily on internet memes as potent visual-affective tools for conveying hate across seemingly distinct political contexts, the thesis reveals and theorizes the “memetic alliances” being formed among digital microfascist forces—alliances that, it is argued, have transcended the dominant Western alt-right spaces of the manosphere. Contending that manospheric, microfascist masculinism is a byproduct of today’s late capitalist, (neo)fascist era—marked by patriarchal backlash and multiple overlapping crises— this thesis demonstrates how the global alliances online forged by alt-right ideologies blur the boundaries between the West and the non-West. In this context, the thesis argues that the rising Iranian manosphere constitutes a “hybrid space” and finds that local and global mediations of hate and Othering converge in messy, unholy, and interconnected ways. Notably, through qualitative interviews, ethnographic and digital ethnographic methods, the thesis also examines the transnational, grassroots, and memetic feminist tactics—both online and offline—that challenge systemic misogyny and structural inequalities through visually novel, collective forms of resistance. Focusing on Farsi feminist memes and diasporic feminist collectives that emerged in the aftermath of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, the thesis shows that meme-feminist and hopeful tactics take shape as essential tools for building a feminist, antifascist, grassroots, and international movement to resist the global rise of (digital) (micro)fascisms.