Mentioning the unmentionable: Perception of opportunities, agency, emotions, and identity in Iranian resistance rap prior and during the women, life, freedom uprisings

Scholarship on resistance in a strong authoritarian context focuses on everyday acts of resistance and loose solidarity networks prior to protests and overt discursive resistance during the protests. These trends are disjointed since they ignore the public discursive spaces surrounding dissidents in their everyday life and hence fail to historicize overt discursive resistance. To bridge this gap, I introduce “discursive nonmovements” which refer to covertly transgressive yet public discursive spaces that are produced independent of the government, social movement organizations, or political leaders. Such spaces facilitate the creation of loose solidarity networks prior to protests and build the foundation for communicating radical dissent in opportune times without the help of political leaders. Further during uprisings, creators turn the discursive nonmovements to overt protest discourse. By analyzing Iranian rap songs prior and during the Women, Life, Freedom movement using critical discourse analysis, I show how songs have changed from implicit, hopeless, allegorical, and melancholic to explicit, hopeful, and vengeful. The transition is a process of “mentioning the unmentionable” which serves as a public open invitation for ordinary citizens to engage in extraordinary acts of resistance.