ABSTRACT
Based on my PhD research project, ‘Digital Battlegrounds: Memetic alliances, (anti)feminist politics, and the manosphere on Iranian social media,’ I discuss memes and memetic figures from popular Farsi social media platforms and messaging applications and map out the Iranian manosphere’s visual, textual, psychic and discursive traits alongside the rise of the global digital battlegrounds. I draw from theorizations of present-day digital cultures, online misogyny, and the alt-right to develop the concept of ‘memetic alliances,’ which captures the connected yet conflicting forces being increasingly enabled by contemporary global digital cultures through the circulation of affective figurations, particularly between alt-right figurations of hate and the authoritarian figurations they inspire. I apply the term to the ongoing convergences of transnational internet meme culture and unpack the complicated, unforeseen, and increasing alliances with the (predominantly) North American and Iranian online contexts.
