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

Mourning, protest and the problematics of exclusion

Grief, Judith Butler (2004) tells us, should not be thought of as privatising or solitary; rather ‘it furnishes a sense of political community’ (p. 22). The legitimate concern of feminist and media scholars, however, has been that practices of mourning that centre on the patriarchal family may provide a restrictive basis for building political community, especially one based on solidarity. Diana Taylor’s (1997) study of the Argentinian Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is a key reference point here. The Mothers campaigned for the return of their missing sons and daughters who were ‘disappeared’ during the dictatorship, congregating every week in the main square of the capital. Taylor (1997) acknowledges that for female justice campaigners in a patriarchal society, identifying with the category of mother carries a powerful resonance. Mothers, as she argues, are the ‘bearers’ of the nation, worthy of respect; this gives them (though by no means always) a certain protection against the state’s physical violence. Furthermore, their protests may be cast as an extension of their care and responsibility for their children. While maternal identifications allowed the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo a certain political space; nonetheless, Taylor (1997) argues that their public performances have been ‘trapped by a bad script, a narrative activated by the Junta’ (p. 220). In accepting a pre-given identity categorisation as mothers, rather than as ‘women, wives, sisters or human rights activists’, they reproduce the same narratives of familialism and heteropatriarchal bloodline that underpins the narrative of the state. That being said, Taylor also notes, crucially, that performing the mother also gave these women a certain distance from the role and could itself be ‘liberating’. In performing homeliness in public, they were away from the private space of the family home. As the women stated themselves, the Mothers became their new family, whom they cooked and cared for (Taylor, 1997: 206). They constructed close new ties, beyond the patriarchal family.

Picking up on the theme of non-familial forms of belonging, Athena Athanasiou (2017), in her study of the Belgrade-based Women in Black, argues that through their protests ‘new forms of public intimacy emerged, beyond conventional accounts and lineages of kinship’ (p. 30). In the course of protesting against Serbia’s wars, she contends, these women’s deliberate avoidance of the trope of ‘mourning mother’ has allowed them to develop a political practice that is ‘post-identity’, one that does not exclude certain groups from the political space of appearance. This practice, she argues, challenges the hegemonic frameworks which determine only which deaths should be mourned, but also who is entitled to mourn (Athanasiou, 2017), and who ‘remain[s] outside the plurality that acts’ (Butler, 2011, quoted in Athanasiou, 2017: 157). From their inception, Athanasiou points out, Women in Black’s demonstrations in public space were designed to protest and mourn all deaths during the 1990s wars in ex-Yugoslavia, including those of non-Serbs regardless of whether one was a mother or not. Nonetheless, Athanasiou’s argument, in pursuing the theme of non-normative kinship, leaves open the possibility that campaigns led by mothers might also reshape kinship norms. Here, Athanasiou drawson the work of Cecilia Sosa (2014), who argues that despite the assertion of the importance of blood ties in their campaigning, the activism of the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo ‘transformed the very idea of family’ (Sosa 2014: p. 15). Against Diana Taylor, Sosa proposes that the mothers were not ‘trapped by a bad script’ – they rewrote it. She points first of all to a key slogan of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: ‘our children gave birth to us’, which reverses the normative temporality of family lineage, and proposes an experimental form of kinship’ (Sosa, 2014: 17). The Mothers, Sosa argues ‘defined themselves on the basis of a new “we”’, a sisterhood of mothers who were part of the group because of their blood connection to a missing son or daughter, but were not bound to each other by blood ties (Sosa, 2011: 73). The Mothers’ radical wing also, as Sosa puts it, ‘socialised motherhood: they acted for all the missing’ (Sosa, 2014: 92), carrying placards reading ‘one child, all the children’ on their demonstrations (Sosa, 2011: 72). She thus frames their political practice as enacting a ‘queer kinship’, drawing on Butler’s definition of queer relations as those that ‘do not conform to the nuclear family model and that draw on biological and non biological relations, exceeding the reach of certain juridical conceptions, functioning according to non formalizable rules’ (Butler, 2005: quoted in Sosa, 2011: 73). It is ‘this new ‘we’’, as Sosa puts it, comprising both sisterhood, and an expanded conception of motherhood, a ‘we’ connected both by biological and non-biological ties, that resonates, as I shall show, with the discourses of the Iranian #justice-seekingmothers, and allows a framing of their activism as a form of ‘maternalism-from-below’, as defined by Carreon and Moghadam (2015), that is, a deployment of the discourse of motherhood that opens up new political potentialities.

Next, I explore the affective practices (Wetherell, 2012, 2015) that arguably sustain this Iranian maternalism-from-below, practices of intimacy and melancholia that open the women to non-conventional forms of kinship with suffering others. In drawing on Margaret Wetherell’s (2012, 2015) notion of affective practice to analyse how affects of intimacy and melancholia are communicated, I situate both affect and emotion as entangled in social practices of meaning-making and hence as capable of being communicated and mediated visually and linguistically. While affect may be associated with less socially organised or conventional forms of feeling, and emotion with more familiar or canonical forms, I follow Wetherell in not erecting an ontological distinction between the two, and hence, may use either term interchangeably (Wetherell 2015: 59). That being said, I conceive affect as less bounded than emotion, as ‘more about becoming than being, a form of expressive learning and participation’ (Garde-Hansen and Gorton, 2013: 34). This emphasis is more keeping with the focus of this study on the mothers’ network as evolving, performative practice, rather than based in reified and fixed identity.

The intimate public and melancholia

In this section, I frame the #justice-seeking mothers’ public intimacy as an affective practice that shapes new forms of political imaginary. For Lauren Berlant, an intimate public

[w]hether linked to women or other non-dominant people, [….] flourishes as a porous, affective scene of identification among strangers that promises a certain experience of belonging and provides a complex of consolation, confirmation, discipline, and discussion about how to live as an x. (Berlant, 2008: viii)

If we insert the word ‘mother’ in place of ‘x’, we may envisage how the intimate scene of identification can function to attach the subject to structures of familial normativity. Thus, when Berlant (1998) proposes that the intimacy ‘creates spaces’ (p. 282), these may often be ‘spaces of convention’, such as the heteropatriarchal spaces of home and family, ‘reproduc[ing] a fantasy that private life is the real in contrast to collective life’ (p. 283). In highlighting the connection between intimacy and mourning, Athanasiou (2017) likewise points to the ways in which familial and national intimacies can ‘circumscribe’ grievability, or in other words, who is judged to be life worth grieving (p. 12). Nonetheless, Berlant also argues for the possibility of unconventional, non-normative forms of intimacy, in which, one imagines, different values might attach to ‘x’ – in this case, mourning motherhood. ‘What if’, Berlant (1998) asks,

we saw it [intimacy] emerge from much more mobile processes of attachment? While the fantasies associated with intimacy usually end up occupying the space of convention, in practice the drive toward it is a kind of wild thing that is not necessarily organized that way, or any way. It can be portable, unattached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices. (p. 284)

If the drive to intimacy is indeed a ‘wild thing’ that transgresses social boundaries, it may allow new affective practices to emerge, and hence new kinds of public space. In a similar vein, Athanasiou (2017) envisages ‘alternative intimate publics’ (p. 301) created through disruptive practices of mourning that expand notions of who is grievable, who is permitted to grieve, and hence who becomes recognizable as political life.

It is with these propositions in mind that I turn to Shahnaz Akmali’s Instagram post of 29 November 2019, posted after she had visited Nahid Shirpisheh, mother of Pouya Bakhtiari, to pay her respects (Esfandiari, 2019a). Pouya was killed, aged 27 years, during the anti-austerity protests in November 2019 (‘bloody Aban’) along with at least 1500 others (Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), 2020; Esfandiari, 2019b), while engaged as both a participant in the demonstrations and as a citizen journalist. Shahnaz wrote,

I live being a mother, he was someone’s son and I am the mother of all of them, being next to Pouya’s mother reopened my wound as if it was only yesterday that I kissed my son’s lifeless body all over. (29 November 2019)

This postappears to mediate the ‘affective’ porosity of living ‘as an x’, as a mother, in the sense of the maternal subject-position’s potentiality (Berlant, 2008: viii). To ‘live being a mother’, in Shahnaz’s case, means performing, and hence bringing into being, an expanded field of intimacy – not only extending solidarity to other mothers, but ‘being’ the mother of all these lost children. Shahnaz quotes, in her post, Pouya’s verbal protest at the state violence being meted out as he was filming shortly before his own death: ‘don’t shoot them, they are somebody’s sons … I am the son of someone too’ (Esfandiari, 2019a). This ‘someone’ speaks to a demand for political recognition that goes beyond the individual self, to a much broader, non-biological collectivity albeit one still conceived in maternal and familial terms (Sosa 2014).

The image of the reopened wound speaks to the other element of Shahnaz’s affective practice here, that of melancholia. In Freud’s initial conception, melancholia involved a pathological and narcissistic refusal to let go of the lost object, or person. Mourning, however, involved a healthy acceptance of loss (Freud, [1917] 1968). Subsequently, Freud reworked the concept of melancholia to give it a central role in subjectivation – all subjectivity, in this view, involves the introjection of lost objects (Freud, [1923] 1978). Engaging with both essays, in the light of the catastrophes suffered by people of colour and queers, Jose Esteban Muñoz (1999) and David Eng and Shinhee Han (2003) have sought to depathologise melancholia and to reframe it as a subaltern political resource ‘that helps us (re)construct identity and take our dead with us to the various battles we must wage in their names – and in our names’ (Muñoz, 1999: 74). ‘[T]he melancholic’s absolute refusal to relinquish the other’ (Eng and Han, 2003: 364) becomes the basis, then, of an ethical and political project. ⁶ In this conception, to reopen the wound does not mean, as Wendy Brown (1995) would have it, fetishising one’s identity as injured, nor does it mean a fixed and frozen relation to past loss; instead, as Sara Ahmed (2004) argues, against Brown, the open wound means, for the subaltern, to bring the past into the present, ‘into the realm of political action’ to engage with ‘a history of harm’ (p. 33). Eng and Kazanjian (2003) have likewise written of ‘melancholia’s continued and open relationship to the past’, not only for engaging with the present, but for ‘reimagining the future’ (p. 4).

Intimacy, melancholia and the politics of assembly

I now move to analyse in more detail the kinds of space that are created through the intimate and melancholic affective practices of the mothers’ network, and what forms of political subjectivity emerge within these spaces. The essay began with a quotation from Shahnaz Akmali’s Twitter post, which was the first of three addressed to Bahieh Namjou, the mother of the wrestler Navid Afkari, who had been executed a few days earlier. In that post, Shahnaz tells Bahieh that ‘you have now arrived at the assembly of mothers of justice’. The words ‘assembly’ and ‘justice’ strongly imply political deliberation, a gathering as intentional political act, to mete out justice, or at least to determine what is (un)just. What is also suggested is that there is something affectively inevitable about Bahieh’s arrival at this space, which is created through the coming together of those most proximate to loss – the mothers. As a convergence that is represented as affectively impelled by loss itself, the assembly has no choice but to increase its numbers: ‘this assembly [is one] to which I wish to add no other mother’, as Shahnaz writes. It is an assembly defined by the intimacy of shared maternal trauma, that is, as we remember from the first tweet, also, sisterly (‘To my sister, Bahieh Namjou’), that is, both biological and non-biological, both exclusive and inclusive (Sosa 2014).

Shahnaz’s first post has already defined the moment of Bahieh’s arrival, her entry into the assembly. Her second and third posts attempt to give emotional and political shape to Bahieh’s loss, simultaneously narrating and bearing witness to her personal experience of trauma to situate it both within the mothers’ collective trauma and within the assembly as shared public space.

Also I know that these days you are barely alive, unable to know what has happened to you. But in the next coming days, the world will begin to collapse on you, when you want to call your Saeed [. . .] but by mistake you say Navid; when you see someone who is walking on the street, and from behind, he looks like him; when you see him in dreams, but as soon as you hug him, he disappears. That moment when you hear him saying ‘mother, mother’ in your ear, but you can’t see him, and millions more moments that you may be experiencing, but you have to know that the soul of your son will sprout in your heart, and will bless you with his courage. I have seen this with all of these justice-seeking mothers.

Their courage is not a normal one. It is like that of someone who has seen death and has returned (from it), just like their children, and you, be calm that your heart will show you the way, and our hands are joined from here [Tehran] to Shiraz until the day of justice, until the day of justice, until the day of justice. Your companion in suffering, Shahnaz Akmali. (14 September 2020) ⁷

Shahnaz describes this at first unfathomable experience as the beginning of a journey that each of the mothers make towards death – their own and that of their child’s – from which they return with a renewed courage, born of a sense that the son or daughter is a living presence within them. The mothers’ melancholic ‘refusal to relinquish the other’ (Eng and Han, 2003: 364), which is also a ‘refusal to conform to the existing order of things’ (Athanasiou, 2017: 22) is central to this trajectory. In the terms of this melancholic narrative, Bahieh may be ‘unable to know what has happened’ to her, but eventually, it is suggested, she will know. If trauma renders the sufferer speechless – hence ‘the impossibility of bearing witness’, even to themselves – Shahnaz here publicly declares herself as Bahieh’s interlocutor, the figure ‘who bears out the traumatic process with the survivor, allowing him or her to bear witness. . . to his or her experience’ (Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009: 3). Shahnaz’s message stages her own suffering, along with that of Bahieh Namjou and other mothers, through an act of testimony which effects a transition from the personal to the political, from the ‘instant’ to the ‘instance’ (Derrida, 1993, quoted in Frosh and Pinchevski, 2009: 7). For one who identifies as a mother to do this is itself disruptive of gender norms: ‘shifting the maternal from the private to the public creates a sense of transformation that may not be well received’, as Carreon and Moghadam (2015) put it (p. 29).

Through Shahnaz’s intimate and melancholic address, I argue, the mothers’ assembly is co-produced both as a space and as an ongoing performative practice. Through assembling, in this case to mourn, people come together to exercise ‘a performative right to appear, one that asserts and instates the body in the midst of the political field’ (Butler, 2015: 11); they enact a relation to each other, based upon the vulnerability of bodies, of bodily needs – for a right to food, shelter, in this case the right to life and security – that is a basis for political collectivity. Key to Butler’s (2015) conception of the performativity that constitutes the assembly is that it is plural: assembly is a form ‘of coordinated action, whose condition and aim is the reconstitution of plural forms of agency’ (p. 9). This plurality has implications for how the political subject here is conceived. The ‘I’ is situated and constituted in relation to others, to the ‘We’ (Butler, 2015: 76–77); in that sense, ‘it is not . . . individuals who act’, nor does the ‘We’ become a singular entity (p. 84). Butler (2015) argues, then, that assembly presumes and enables ‘a set of enabling and dynamic relations’ between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ (p. 27). In Shahnaz’s address to Bahieh, this ‘We’ is summoned into being as something that will endure till ‘the day of justice’ – a phrase thrice-repeated. ‘The provisional assembly’ Butler (2015) reminds us, ‘still makes a call for justice’ (p. 18). To invoke justice is to invoke a principle which encompasses but also goes beyond the plurality of needs and demands expressed by the members of the assembly, to make a larger call for the recognition of otherwise disposable and disenfranchised life (Butler, 2015: 26), and to ‘address at every . . . level the differential exposure to death and dying’ (p. 35) of the ‘someone’, or their child. Carreon and Moghadam (2015) likewise show how the politicisation of motherhood entails making the link between particular tragedies and wider ‘antihegemonic’ claims upon the state for justice. What I am suggesting is that these radical practices of intimate melancholia insist upon a sense of the maternal ‘I’ as open and changeable, yet not as directionless or without history. This ‘I’ is already situated as part of a ‘We’ that is in movement towards a political futurity, but also brings the burden of the past with it.

Mediating the intimate assembly

The assembly, for Butler, is both an embodied and a mediated performance. As much as the physical infrastructures of urban space, technological infrastructures provide the conditions of the assembly’s appearance. In that sense, the media ‘is the stuff of self-constitution, the site of the hegemonic struggle over who “we” are’ (Butler, 2015: 20). Nor is media use separable from the vulnerability of bodily assembling (Butler, 2015: 92-93), as Pouya Bakhtiari’s case (above) showed. The mothers’ media use also exposes them to retaliation from the state, including imprisonment. ⁸

The #justice-seeking mothers’ network utilises, in the main, Twitter and Instagram. Both platforms are distinguished by the use of hashtags, which easily enable cross-platform dissemination and archiving of threads. Hashtags become resources for the mothers’ affective practices of intimacy (Rambukkana 2015). Not only do hashtags enable the emergence of online political collectivities (Gerbaudo, 2014; Romancini, 2020); they shape the emotional relation between the individual and the communal, the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, ‘amplifying a form of connective rather than only collective action’ (Johnson and Parry, 2022: 6; Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). In this network, the hashtags repeat variations on a key phrase, ‘justice-seeking’, interspersed with names of victims (sons, usually) and their mothers. This affective narrative of stubborn persistence is continually reinforced between the mothers who act as ‘nodes’ in the network. I instance a Twitter post from Mansoureh Behkish, one of the Mothers of Kharavan previously mentioned, who lost six members of her family during the mass killings of imprisoned leftists in 1988:

Salutations to #Shahnaz Akmali who is still #seeking justice. Hope that we the rivers of #justice-seekers join each other in a roaring flood and uproot the foundation of injustice in Iran. (Mansoureh Behkish, 7 October 2018, Twitter post)

I have translated the Persian greeting as ‘salutations’ to convey the respect accorded by other mothers to Shahnaz for her courage, dignity and determination. The frequent use of the hashtag ‘justice-seekers’, echoing back Shahnaz’s language, as here, not only gives feelings of grief and anger a shape, but, as I mentioned above, a directedness, a sense of intentional movement towards a goal, a feeling which is reinforced by the image of rivers merging in a revolutionary flood. The image not only references the combined actions of individual mothers but also, in this context, the accumulated impetus of generations of victims of injustice. Hence the ‘We’ that uproots the unjust foundations of the ruling order is imagined as expanding beyond the ranks of the mothers and their families to encompass the eventual ‘“fusion” of individuals in a collective subject with majoritarian ambitions’ (Gerbaudo, 2012: 14). As Butler (2015) argues, the ‘we’ that is performatively assembled around the demand for justice is always, in some sense, ‘we the people’.

Nonetheless, as I suggested, this ‘We’ is in actuality plural, rather than ecstatically fused. Thus, I argue, the mothers’ intimate public is structured around different levels of intimacy. Two of the three mothers’ communications I have discussed so far have taken a ‘dyadic’ form, that is, they take the form of a personal message addressed by one individual to another. Yet in effect, the communicative relation is triadic: on social media platforms, there is always a third party present, in the shape of a large, mostly anonymous audience of present and future social media users. As Danny Kaplan (2021) has argued, in situations of mediated public intimacy, the presumption is that the performance of intimacy will be less intense, whereas the reverse is often the case. Moreover, the dyadic emotional performance will likely attract a wider audience, who enjoy a vicarious intimacy in witnessing the intenser intimacy of the two protagonists. While Berlant (2008) envisaged intimate publics as emerging in mass mediated contexts among strangers (p. viii), what is characteristic about the social media communications of the #justiceseekingmothers is that there appear to be two circles of intimacy, that of the mothers, ⁹ who may call each other ‘sisters’, and that of the wider anonymous public of strangers.

This observation speaks to the debate on hierarchies of mourning that I engaged with above. Penelope Papailias has argued for the potential of social media affordances to democratise access to mourning and grief. In her study of the digital witnessing and mourning of the death of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish refugee boy who drowned during his family’s attempt to cross the Aegean to claim asylum, Papailias convincingly argues that the accumulation of online affect around the image of his death drove a broader (even if temporary) change in European citizens’, and even states’, attitudes to migrants (Papailias, 2019). Hence, she contests sceptical interpretations of the circulation of such iconic images as voyeuristic or narcissistic spectacle (Mortensen, 2017). Against those who would defend ‘the priority, even exclusivity, of biological and cultural kinship in mourning’ (Papailias, 2019: 1057), Papailias (2019) applies Judith Butler’s point, that ‘grief should not be thought of as essentially solitary and privatizing, but rather as the potential basis of political community’ (p. 1058), since our openness to the other ‘seems to follow from bodily life, from its vulnerability and its exposure’ (Butler, 2004, quoted in Papailias, 2019: 1058). I am sympathetic to an argument that highlights the affordances of the digital realm for a broader politics of justice and recognition. I am also wary, however, that the de-territorialisation of grief, in the way Papailias describes, ties in with the hegemonising ideology that Anita Say Chan has called ‘digital universalism’, that is ‘the idea of the Net as a uniquely and universally inclusive and equalizing space – one that operates free from the physical biases of the offline world’ (Chan, 2014: 7; also Willems, 2021). Moreover, even as she invokes a rhizomatic, horizontalist, digital realm traversed by networked affective flows, Papailias still takes care to note that Kurdi’s father lent his support to the circulation of the image of his son’s dead body.

Against this case, we may set the example of the role of families in the justice campaign following the Korean Sewol ferry disaster in 2014, in which over 250 young people died. Kathleen Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth (2017) argue that the mobile selfie footage of young people’s last moments helped to generate a digital intimate public which not only mourned, but sought justice and recognition from the government for its culpable negligence, ultimately leading to its downfall. In their account, what they term as a ‘unique’ Korean form of cultural intimacy, jeong, plays a leading role. Jinah Kim (2020) argues, however, that it was the ‘insurgent melancholia’ of the grieving families, especially the leading role of the mothers, that played a decisive role in changing the political climate around the disaster, both through their online communications and offline gatherings. The narrative of mobile and social media as enabling a horizontal, structureless and rhizomatic accumulation of affect looks rather less convincing when a more detailed picture of political agency is unfolded. This is not to dismiss the importance of the wider digital intimate public that Cumiskey and Hjorth describe, but the example does suggest that the phenomenon of two circles of intimacy as a structuring principle of digitally mediated justice campaigns may be more widespread than proponents of digital horizontalism suggest. Put differently, while the ‘We’ may expand to encompass all those who demand and require justice from the state, the reference point of this ‘We’ often remains a particular identity category, that of the mother, which has a certain relation to blood kinship, even if this relation is not the end point of the process. The mediated intimacy of this kind of assembly invokes a conception of familial bonds which is both expansive and bounded, solidaristic and hierarchical.

Instagram as a space of political appearance

To constitute the space of political appearance, in Butler’s (2015) conception of the assembly, the body must appear: ‘[t]here is an indexical force of the body when it arrives with other bodies in a zone visible to media coverage: it is this body and these bodies that assert their right to conditions of liveability’ (pp. 9–10). In this section, I analyse images and captions from Shahnaz Akmali’s public Instagram archive in an attempt to analyse the hybrid visual interventions of the #justiceseekingmothers as an intimate assembly. While I refer to the technological affordances of Instagram as a social media platform, however, I do not assume these affordances are ‘universally valid’; instead I take them to be ‘shaped by the contexts in which they are used’ (Willems, 2021: 1679). Accordingly, I borrow the concept of ‘relational affordance’ from Wendy Willems (2021) to refer to the properties of the local social, cultural and physical environments which combine with the properties of the technology to furnish communicative resources for the (prod)user. Agreeing with Butler (2015) that ‘the media constitutes the scene [of assembly] in a time and a place that includes and exceeds its local instantiation’ (p. 91), my intention is to navigate between digitally universalist and culturally particularist approaches. Here I also situate relational affordances as cultural resources or repertoires that can be drawn on by affective practices. As Margaret Wetherell (2015) explains, affective practices draw on cultural repertoires in the form of visual and linguistic tropes, vivid images or references to popular narratives. Where these tropes occur in the Instagram images discussed below, I therefore treat them as part of the relational affordances that inform the production and reception of the image as a simultaneously global and local artefact.

Instagram has been depicted primarily as offering a set of affordances for individual self-curation, often utilising the mobile phone affordance and genre of the selfie. In writing of Instagram’s ‘photo-sharing vernacular that is normatively self-centred’, Gibbs et al. (2015) remark on the tension that arises when this vernacular is used in the context of death and mourning, for example, to record the experience of a funeral. Larissa Hjorth (2018) notes that ‘camera phone apps like Instagram operate to capture, share, and represent the mundane, intimate, ephemeral, tacit, and phatic’ (p. 67). This intimacy may be intensified, as Hjorth recounts, with the added dimension of the punctum (Barthes, 1981), the ‘piercing’ feeling that arises, for instance, when one registers that the selfie one is looking at is now a memorial to a young person who has died (Hjorth, 2018). While intimacy and mundane self-curation figure among the affective practices associated with Instagram as a transnational platform, these practices interweave with specific genres of image that are produced by the #justiceseekingmothers, notably the visit to the son or daughter’s grave, the visit to each other’s homes and the ritual holding of the dead child’s photograph.

The image of the lost child recurs across these visual genres, and needs to be situated in here in the context of the Islamic Republic’s rituals of official mourning for the martyred dead who gave their lives for the nation, rituals which began during the Iran-Iraq war, known as the Sacred Defence (Varzi, 2006, 2008). Visits to cemeteries where countless young men were buried became part of Iranian daily life and popular culture; murals of martyrs occupied public spaces. The historical role of women in mourning assumed a newly public and national significance, now that Shia narratives of religious martyrdom had been appropriated by the state. In Newsha Tavakolian’s photographic series from 2006, Mothers of Martyrs, as Rachel Fox argues, the centrality of ‘state martyrs’ within these frames is triply confirmed – photographs of dead sons are additionally framed by the body of the mother and by the borders of Tavakolian’s images – whereas the ‘dissident martyrs’, such as those killed in the Green Movement protests of 2009, are rendered invisible or marginal in the official narrative (Fox, 2016; Talebi, 2012). Following Butler (2004, 2009), Fox contends that the frame is both visual and epistemological, that to be included in the frame is to be constituted by the state as grievable life. In this political context, I contend, Shahnaz’s repeated re-centring of the image of her lost son, placing it again and again within the frames of the images on her Instagram page (Figures 1 to 3), draws on the affective structure of melancholia to pose a challenge to the state’s hierarchies of grievability, its ordering of life and death. This oppositional melancholia allows the intimate affective practice of Shahnaz’s mourning to contest the hegemonic intimacy, the ‘national sentimentality’ of official mourning (Athanasiou, 2017; Berlant, 1998).

A key trope on Shahnaz’s Instagram page is the perennial return to her son Mostafa’s graveside to lay flowers or to carefully wash the marble slab. ¹⁰ Her actions directly counterpose her son’s status as dissident martyr for justice to the state’s narrative which deems those it kills as outside the frame of grievable life. On 27 December 2019, Shahnaz posted a picture, with caption, of the top half of Mostafa’s grave slab, with the damage it suffered in a 2014 attack by a person or persons unknown, mostly likely state personnel ¹¹ (Figure 1). This damage manifests in the form of large cracks, mostly around the image of Mustafa’s face, which was taken from a photographic image of him that itself appears numerous times in Shahnaz’s Instagram page. Part of the damage centres around the inscription, which reads: ‘The innocent martyr of Ashura’. Ashura is a day in the Shia calendar which every year marks the martyrdom of Imam Hussein at the hands of the oppressor, Yazid, and which in 2009, on December 27, was the occasion for the violent repression of the Green Movement protests during which Mostafa and dozens of others lost their lives (Dabashi, 2011). Part of the caption to Shahnaz’s Instagram post reads:

This year is the 10th year since they opened your forehead with a bullet and I with my own eyes saw and witnessed your red blood from the corner of your black eyes and then I realised that one can die 1000 times in a second without the soul leaving the body and these years, my dear Mostafa, sometimes I have died a thousand times.

Although neither the son’s nor the mother’s bodies are present here, in one sense, their conjoined vulnerability is amply represented. Shahnaz’s performative recollection of the violence done to her son’s body is visually echoed by the violence done to the grave, with one crack extending across Mostafa’s forehead in the image. The affective resonance of the image-caption is amplified by the evocation of the mother’s continual melancholic return to the source of the trauma, which does not lessen with time. If, as seems likely, the state was responsible for this damage, then in this reading, the Islamic Republic, the supposed protector of Muslims, becomes Yazid, the oppressor, a second time – the first being the occasion of Mostafa’s death. ¹² The cracks were not repaired in a way that mitigates the visual impact of the damage, but have been filled in with light-coloured cement and left visible. In this post, I argue, these cracks appear not only as a symbolic reopening of the original trauma or wound inflicted upon Mostafa, but also a reopening of Shahnaz’s own psychic wound, which is here restaged through the taking of the photograph, and its posting together with the caption. The post thus performatively directs melancholia and intimacy in a counter-narrative to that of the state, drawing on the relational affordances of martyrdom and the role of female mourners in state and popular culture. On one hand, the melancholic structure seeks to arrest official temporality which seeks to ‘move on’ from its own violence; in this sense, if agents of the state were responsible for the damage, the state has assisted this counter-narrative by confirming that it too has not ‘moved on’, that its violence is part of the present, and not only the past. On the other hand, in tandem with their melancholic representation of traumatic rupture in the fabric of life, Shahnaz’s Instagram and Twitter posts also represent the everyday continuity which the attacker(s) sought to disrupt – a project of intimate world-making, that is, as Berlant (1998) puts it, precisely ‘formed around threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain’ (p. 288). The relational affordances of the Instagram platform in its Iranian context are here utilised to narrate the oppressor’s violence which has shattered the sphere of family life; this life nonetheless continues to manifest its resilience through the very practice of visual archiving and curation. If the space of the assembly depends upon staging the vulnerability of bodies that are normally deemed disposable, this post reasserts the claim of both the son and the mother to recognition.

The second image (Figure 2), which appeared on Shahnaz’s Instagram on 27 February 2021, is an example of the visual genre of home visits, where the mothers visit each other’s homes to pay their respects and jointly memorialise their lost children, presenting their framed photographs to be captured by someone’s camera phone. What is also memorialised, of course, is the gathering itself, which I interpret, again, as a variant of assembly in Butler’s (2015) sense. Given that outdoor gatherings of any size would be suppressed, this visual record, on a public Instagram account, of an indoor gathering contributes to the ongoing creation of a political space for the #justiceseekingmothers. As with the previous photograph, two sets of bodies appear – the dead, in their spectral presence as framed images within the image, and the bodies of the living mourners. The image emphasises the collective purpose of the mourners’ assembly: they sit or kneel close together in the small space, their bodies touching, all wearing black or dark clothing. The mourners’ affective staging draws on the affordances of the Instagram platform in combination with the affordances of the space, which are both physical and symbolic. This female sociality is thus lent a serious and respectable character partly because it takes place in the ‘private’ and conventional space of the home. Referring to the Women in Black in Belgrade, Athanasiou (2017) argues that ‘[their] activism does not rely on a divide between public and private, but rather carries with it the performative possibility for a disruptive sense of belonging, homeliness, and publicness’ (p. 246): the Women create a new sense of mutual belonging through their actions outside the home. Unlike the Women in Black, who reject most of the trappings of conventional homeliness as patriarchal, the Iranian #justiceseekingmothers, in images like these, bring the public sphere into the home, and, via social media, make the home itself public. In that sense, however, their ‘homeliness’ is also disruptive.

A similar observation applies to the performance of kinship in the group photograph (Figure 2). While most of the mourners are mothers holding pictures of their dead sons, not all the mourners are blood relatives of the deceased. While Shahnaz is close to the camera on the far left, Narges Mohammadi, the human rights lawyer, who had been released from prison in October 2020, occupies a central position fourth from the right, her hand resting on a large photograph of a young man. Shahnaz had previously declared she would be Narges’ ‘voice’ when Narges was imprisoned in 2016, just as she had been for her son. ¹³ As Cecilia Sosa (2014) might point out, the campaigning of these women has created new forms of kinship and sociality, where the biological and the non-biological, private and public, interweave. An intimate public of ‘sisters’ appears, then, to a wider intimate public of strangers. The mothers’ affective visual practices of intimacy and melancholic grieving both utilise and disrupt the relational affordances of homeliness, kinship, female sociality and public mourning, to assert their claim to a space of political appearance.

The final image I discuss (Figure 3) is unusual in this Instagram archive, in that it stages maternal grief outside of the contexts of graveside visits or social gatherings On 15 January 2020, Shahnaz’s Instagram page featured an image of her putting a fairly large photograph of her son in her handbag or purse (the photograph would barely fit), prior to setting off to begin her 1-year sentence in Evin prison for ‘propaganda against the government’ (Amnesty Iran, 2020). The caption reads,

I am a mother whose only crime is seeking justice and repeating this [action] and [asking] a simple question which was never answered. Who killed my son? Who killed my children? I am grateful to all those people who have been next to me and my family. We are each other’s family #mostafakarimbeigi.

The prison sentence itself is a reminder of the character of the mothers’ social media posts as forms of bodily appearance; if the media itself ‘constitutes the scene’ of assembly, as Butler (2015) points out (p. 91), these posts, in turn, render bodies vulnerable to detention and harassment. Here, Shahnaz’s caption evokes the repetition of melancholia. The repetition itself carries an affective charge, recalling Cecilia Sosa’s (2014) description of the Madres of the Plaza de Mayo, whose weekly demonstrations repeatedly circled the square: ‘there is something wild encrypted in their mourning bodies, a sort of stubbornness that goes beyond pedagogy. . . that points to a nonverbal dimension of trauma’ (p. 16). Similarly, I suggest, Shahnaz’s refusal to submit to the state’s regulation of her body and voice has something ‘wild’ about it, not only in the sense of transgressing the boundaries set by the state, but manifesting an affective ‘excess’ that challenges the masculinist public sphere’s conventions of ‘rational’ communication. Sosa’s remark in turn recalls Berlant’s (1998) observation concerning intimacy, that it while it may occupy ‘the space of convention, in practice the drive towards it is a kind of wild thing that is not necessarily organised that way’ (p. 284). Nonetheless, the image-caption, and the action it records, still orients intimate and melancholic affects in a particular direction – that is, towards justice, for both biological (‘my son’) and non-biological kin (‘my children’), within the expanded ‘family’ of mourners. Berlant (1998) refers to intimacy, in the same passage, as emerging from ‘mobile processes of attachment’; the drive towards it, in her words, ‘can be portable, unattached to a concrete space: a drive that creates spaces around it through practices’ (p. 284). Drawing on this insight, I suggest that the image signals an intention to create a space of intimacy wherever the mourner ends up. Even though the state has reached into the home to pluck Shahnaz out of it, she will take with her a disruptive sense of homeliness. The post asserts this intention through enacting a triple reframing of her son as grievable, not disposable life (Fox, 2016): the reframing comprises the photograph of the son in the scene, her purse and Instagram image of the scene; recalling Muñoz’s (1999) point, Shahnaz is carrying the dead with her to the battles she must wage in her son’s name, her own name and those of other children and mothers (p. 74). ¹⁴ While this mobile space of homely intimacy may seem to diverge from Butler’s (2015) definition of the assembly as bodies acting ‘in concert’, the collectivity invoked in Shahnaz’s post is also imagined as asserting its right to appear, and to be recognised.

Conclusion

This article has analysed the mediated affective practices of the network of #justice-seeking mothers in Iran, as they contest the state’s attempts to determine whose lives can appear as grievable and worthy of recognition (Butler, 2015). The research has situated the melancholic performance of mourning motherhood as central to the mediation of a ‘wild’ public intimacy (Berlant, 1998), which challenges conventional gendered boundaries between the private and the public spheres, and imagines new forms of solidaristic connection. In this intimate public, nonetheless, the intimacy of the activist circle of ‘sisters’ appears as distinct from the intimacy of ‘strangers’, that is the broader public of social media users. While important feminist scholarship has emphasised the democratising and inclusive dimensions of mourning activism that goes beyond the patriarchal family as a reference point (Athanasiou, 2017; Papailias, 2019), this article is wary of forms of digital universalism that stress the globally emancipatory affordances of social media platforms, including their potential for horizontal, structureless and rhizomatic forms of connectivity. I argue here that attention to the ‘relational’ (cultural, social, physical) affordances of digital mourning (Willems, 2021) reveals that networked activism may adopt a flexible combination of maternalist tropes, and quasi-conventional and non-conventional forms of kinship, as it seeks to carve out a space of political appearance. It is this provisional and fluid approach to emotional and political ties that enables the dynamic relation between the ‘I’ and the ‘We’ that I have referred to, thus constituting the mothers’ assembly as a plural, solidaristic collectivity.