Visual resistance, digital counterpublics, and feminist agency in Iran’s digital protests from 2018 to 2023

This paper explores how visual media circulated on Persian-language X (formerly Twitter) became central to feminist protest in Iran between 2018 and 2023, particularly following the death of Mahsa Amini in September 2022. Departing from the dominant textual focus in digital activism scholarship, the study centers protest images, such as acts of unveiling, symbolic destruction, and public confrontation, as discursive interventions that disrupt gendered state authority and reconfigure the visual regime of the Islamic Republic. Drawing on visual discourse analysis, feminist media theory, and intersectional critiques of digital infrastructure, I analyze 150 high-engagement posts to examine how visual resistance operates within the constraints of surveillance, platform bias, and algorithmic governance. The findings demonstrate that such imagery not only challenges hegemonic representations of femininity but constitutes new feminist political imaginaries rooted in embodied defiance and digital circulation. I argue that visual protest under authoritarianism is both a site of symbolic power and a field of structural inequality, where visibility is contested, conditional, and politically charged. In doing so, this study contributes to broader debates on mediated resistance, gendered subjectivity, and the politics of looking in repressive media environments.