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Mehran's Theory of Digital Feminist Placemaking and it's Role

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In this week’s articles, we focused on the role of technology in the creation of a new form of activism through digital spaces. This unprecedented form of protest has taken off in several ways, including twitter activism as well as digital feminist place making, both of these becoming core avenues of dissemination of the WLF movement. With the adoption of these methods, we once again see the malleability of the WLF ideology as something that can retain its central message, while achieving far-reaching resonance with people around the world, without losing any of its significance. Therefore, it is not diluted with the advent of this new technology and forms of protest, but instead embraces them to their fullest potential. In the case of digital place making, the WLF movement has utilized this digital space with a feminist bent. We now see the culmination of a powerful feminist wave geographically speaking, and now with the WLF movement, the creation of digital platforms which “facilitate communication, collective mobilization and advocacy through social media.” (Mehan, p 15) With this collectivist approach, we see the incorporation of art, hashtags, and other forms of media into the efforts of place making; overhauling the gender segregated system on the ground in Iran in favor of an integrated platform for social justice.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Two artists that have capitalized on this digital place making especially effectively are Aghrahan Khosravi and Sartosht Rahimi. Khosravi utilizes multidimensional visual art as a catalyst to prompt a reevaluation of women’s agency through the use of traditional Persian motifs, while Rahimi uses feminists symbols more closely associated with contemporary Iran, in effect increasing the accessibility of his message and expanding on the centrality of women’s rights.

These two different approaches both adeptly utilize digital feminist place making to overcome physical barriers imposed by the Islamic regime. Both sides of the temporal continuum expressed between these two artists capture the poignancy of the WLF movement today. Without these digital spaces, the movement would be bound by the physical/social spaces engineered by the Islamic Republic. By utilizing social media and other digital spaces, these artists have capitalized on a new technology to create an art movement wholly divorced from place, one that can use the entirety of Iran’s shared cultural vocabulary while still reaching far beyond Iran’s borders, promoting WLF’s intersectional feminist ties, while remaining grounded in the imagery and culture of Iran.

-Satchel Williams

References: 

     H Kermani, “#MahsaAmini: Iranian Twitter Activism in Times of Computational Propaganda,” Social Movement Studies
Actions, 20 Feb 2023.            

     Mehan, Asma. “Digital Feminist Placemaking: The Case of the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Movement.” Actions Urban planning1 (2024)

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