Alt-right and authoritarian memetic alliances: global mediations of hate within the rising Farsi manosphere on Iranian social media

Abstract

This article examines the rising Farsi ‘manosphere’ of Iran and the case of online misogynistic, anti-feminist and anti-queer mobilisations across social media platforms and messaging applications. It focuses on memes and memetic figures that are circulated on Iranian social media and proposes the term ‘memetic alliances’ to convey complicated and unforeseen mutations of today’s internet meme culture and online hate culture. Moreover, it unpacks 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 article theorises that online figurations of hate have memeto-(micro)political qualities that allow for their propagation across numerous contexts. Furthermore, 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.