Affective Territories of Resistance in Iran’s Women, Life, Freedom Movement

Abstract

This article examines how resistance persists under repression by shifting attention from visible protest to the affective and relational processes that sustain political agency. Focusing on the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, it challenges dominant spatial approaches that privilege physical territory as the primary site of political struggle by developing a three-dimensional conceptual framework of affective territories, understood as relational formations sustained through embodied affect, relational solidarity, and everyday resistance. It demonstrates how dispersed practices (re)produce infrastructures of resistance beyond moments of collective mobilisation. By emphasising the affective and intimate dimensions of political life, the article offers a way of analysing forms of resistance that are often overlooked and shows how these can function as enduring sites of political possibility even under conditions of sustained repression.