Wild Intimacies: Justice-Seeking Mothers in Iran, Networked Activism and the Affective Politics of Mourning

Abstract

This article analyses the mediated affective practices of the network of #justice-seeking mothers in Iran, who campaign for justice for their children’s deaths at the hands of the state. I situate their melancholic performance of maternal mourning as central to the mediation of a ‘wild’ public intimacy, which contests the state’s attempts to limit and foreclose the spaces of political appearance. This intimate public, I argue, draws on the affordances of visuality and hashtags on Instagram and Twitter to invoke expanded notions of ‘home’ and ‘motherhood’that affectively sustain its political activism. Recent feminist scholarship has emphasised the counter-hegemonic potentials of mourning practices that go beyond the patriarchal family as a reference point, especially in campaigns that seek justice for and recognition of the dead, whether these practices are offline or online. I argue, however, that attention to the ‘relational’ (cultural, social, physical) affordances of digital mourning in this case s reveals that grassroots maternalism may draw its emotional resources from a shifting combination of conventional (familial) and non-conventional forms of kinship. It is this fluid and provisional approach to emotional and political ties that enables the #justice-seeking mothers’ network to mobilise a variety of intimate registers in constructing an affective space of political appearance.