Global Horizons, Constrained Lives: Generation Z in Iran and the Making of Alternative Normalcy

• In Event: Soft Power, Hard Borders: The Geopolitics of Diaspora Engagement

Abstract

This paper examines the central role of Generation Z women in the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement through the lens of intergenerational storytelling, affective transmission, and embodied resistance. While existing scholarship has emphasized decades of organized feminist activism, legal contestation, and everyday public resistance under the Islamic Republic, this study shifts attention to the intimate and relational processes through which emotions were formed, shared, and sedimented across generations. I argue that the intensity of embodied defiance displayed in 2022 cannot be understood as a spontaneous reaction to state violence alone. Rather, it reflects the activation of historically layered affective formations cultivated within families, peer networks, and digital spaces. Drawing on 30 in-depth interviews with Gen Z participants, primarily women, and longitudinal digital ethnography conducted between 2021 and 2026 across Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube, I trace how narratives of repression, disappointment, and gendered negotiation circulated within domestic gatherings, classrooms, and online exchanges. Stories of earlier protest cycles, state violence, and everyday humiliation were transmitted not as distant history but as lived testimony. These repeated acts of sharing transformed personal experiences into collectively legible emotions, shaping embodied orientations toward authority.Theoretically, the paper builds on Williams’ concept of structure of feeling and scholarship on emotions, narrative, and everyday resistance to conceptualize this process as affective sedimentation across generations. I show how emotions cultivated in intimate circles became embodied dispositions that later surfaced in visible acts such as hair cutting, collective dancing, and public refusal. By foregrounding intergenerational storytelling as an affective infrastructure of dissent, the paper contributes to sociological understandings of embodiment, memory, and the nonlinear formation of political subjectivity.

Author

• Mahbubeh Moqadam, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign