(Inter)generational Storytelling and the Making of Embodied Defiance in the Woman, Life, Freedom Movement

• In Event: Global and Transnational Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 4. Politics, Narratives, and Experiences

Abstract

When the Woman, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement erupted in Iran in 2022 following the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini, Generation Z women stood at its forefront. Their unveiled bodies, acts of public hair cutting, collective dancing, and intimate gestures of solidarity quickly became iconic symbols of defiance. Existing scholarship has traced the uprising to decades of organized feminist activism and everyday resistance under the Islamic Republic. This paper shifts attention to a less visible but crucial dimension: the (inter)generational storytelling through which experiences of repression, gender hierarchy, and political betrayal circulated within intimate spaces long before 2022. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ concept of “structure of feeling,” the sociology of emotions, and relational-processual sociology, I argue that Gen Z women’s centrality in the WLF movement cannot be understood as a spontaneous reaction to state violence alone. Rather, it reflects the cumulative sedimentation of affect transmitted vertically through families and laterally through peer networks. Stories shared in family gatherings about the mass executions of the 1980s, the 1999 student protests, the 2009 Green Movement, and the 2019 crackdown formed early orientations toward authority. Simultaneously, everyday observations of mothers and aunts negotiating gendered constraints rendered hierarchy visible and contestable. In digital spaces, Gen Z women further circulated accounts of harassment, humiliation, and resistance, transforming personal experience into collective recognition. Empirically, the paper draws on 30 in-depth interviews with Gen Z individuals, primarily women, and longitudinal digital ethnography conducted between 2021 and 2026 across Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube. I conceptualize these processes as fractally structured affective sedimentation: a recursive layering of memory and emotion that becomes embodied as disposition. By foregrounding storytelling as an affective infrastructure of dissent, this paper contributes to the sociology of social movements by demonstrating how intimate relational spaces generate historically intelligible forms of embodied resistance under authoritarian rule.

Author

• Mahbubeh Moqadam, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign