Global Mediations of hate, the Iranian manosphere and feminist tactics

On the 19th of October, Sama Khosravi Ooryad will be delivering their ongoing research which examines examines the rising Iranian manosphere and the case of online misogynistic, anti-feminist and anti-queer mobilisations across social media platforms and messaging applications. The presentation will primarily focus on memes and memetic figures that are circulated on Iranian social media to highlight complicated and unforeseen mutations of today’s internet meme culture and online hate culture. 

Furthermore, the presentation will unpack the the increasing convergences of seemingly conflicting online and political contexts. Drawing on digital ethnographic fieldwork on selected platforms as well as visual and conceptual analyses of memes, the research investigates how the case of Iran’s emergent Farsi manosphere is arguably not a totalitarian exception unique to the Middle East, but is reconfiguring and standing in alliance with the global rise of the right and its online culture wars. Moreover, the research will discuss the innovative feminist responses to the Iranian manosphere and the systemic misogyny at work in Iran by giving theoretical accounts of the current tactics adopted or mobilized throughout mediated spaces.  

Sama Khosravi Ooryad is a PhD candidate in film and media studies at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her project is part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Horizon 2020 doctoral training network, NETHATE, which is a network of excellence for training to understand and counter hate online. Sama’s scholarly work has been published in the form of book chapters as well as double-blind, peer-reviewed journal articles in feminist theory, media, culture and society, feminist media studies (forthcoming), somatechnics: journal of bodies, technologies, and power (forthcoming), MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, and CLCweb: Comparative Literature and Culture.