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 discursive spaces surrounding dissidents in their everyday life. To bridge this gap, I introduce “discursive nonmovements” which refers to latent, diffused, and non-institutional spaces which serve as a gravity center for loose solidarity networks prior to protests and transform to protest discourse during it. By focusing on the case study of Iranian rap prior and during the Women, Life, Freedom movement, I show how songs have changed from implicit, hopeless, allegorical, and melancholic to explicit, hopeful, and vengeful. Further, by relying on phenomenological approaches to political opportunities structures, I argue that “mentioning the unmentionable” after years of implicit discursive resistance, serves as a public open invitation to ordinary citizens to engage in extraordinary acts of resistance.