My second single-authored book project examines the centrality of joyful affects and women’s bodily autonomy in enactments of “joyful publics” in the socio-political context of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a state that harnesses Shia narratives of sacrifice and mourning for its political ideology. Given the tragic events in the course of the 2026 uprising, I will highlight some ways in which this performative joy has now surfaced in mourning ceremonies for those killed in the protests. Engaging Bourdieu’s practice theory, I examine the lineage of this practice over the course of the past decade or more. The expression of what I call joyous counterpublicity was most pronounced in the course of Iran’s 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, when the world witnessed street gatherings of hundreds of Iranian women who danced around bonfires and threw their headscarves to the flames in great dramatic gestures. Although these street scenes appeared astounding, they carried affective and embodied resonances to everyday acts “practiced” both in private and public for many years. Also drawing on Asef Bayat’s notion of “non-movements” and Michel de Certeau’s “everyday practices,” I argue that through continuing ordinary life practices prevalent in Iranian culture, such as the presence of music and dance in social gatherings, Iranians have maintained an affective sociality and an embodied ethics that by extension afford political agency. Cautious not to inscribe agentive resistance into all daily acts, I argue that although joyful practices have not (necessarily) been maintained for political purposes, they have afforded a discursive space that by now “reads” political. This is especially evident in social media circulations of such affects and adjacent commentaries, which posit these scenes as representing “authentic” Persian culture vs. state-imposed Islamic culture. My book examines the various publics and media spaces that Iranians have cultivated and harnessed in post-revolutionary Iran vis-à-vis the Islamic Republic. At the core, these liberatory practices continue to create narratives that “other” the restrictive state as not “truly Iranian.”
Nahid Siamdoust is Assistant Professor of Media and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a EUME Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at Humboldt University and Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, was the Yarshater Postdoctoral Associate in Iranian Studies at Yale University, and a Visiting Professor in Anthropology of Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Nahid is the author of Soundtrack of the Revolution: The Politics of Music in Iran (Stanford, 2017), co-editor of Iran Amplified: One Hundred Years of Music and Society (Harvard, 2026), and has published in academic journals such as Iranian Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, and Cultural Anthropology. Previously, she was an Iran correspondent for Time Magazine and a Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera International. Her recent commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, New Lines Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, BBC, and NPR. In 2023, she launched the podcast series Woman, Life, Freedom: All in on Iran, which captured and archived important knowledge on the uprising in Iran. It now runs as a series offering interviews with authors of new books on Iran, renamed IranCast. She’s delivered a TEDx Talk titled “Dance for Life.”
Diana Abbani is a cultural historian of the modern Middle East. She holds a PhD in Arabic Studies from Sorbonne University and was a EUME and Fritz Thyssen Fellow (2018-2023) at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Her research focuses on the intersections of popular culture, social and political transformations, and the emergence of music and entertainment industries in Beirut and Bilad al-Sham. She has published extensively on Beirut’s cultural history and is currently preparing a book that explores alternative narratives in the region’s musical history, foregrounding the experiences of marginalized communities during periods of sonic transformation. She is currently the Science Communication Coordinator for the Merian Centre for Advanced Studies in the Maghreb (MECAM) at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.
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