In recent years, the Israeli apparatus of occupation has increasingly integrated automatized operations into its dispositfs of violence, surveillance, and control. From drone technologies to hasbara bots, both violent assaults and the so-called ‘battle of ideas’ are being fought more and more through purely mechanic interactions. Moreover, in line with its preventive policing approach, Israel’s cyber-security forces have recently designed and applied algorithmic scanning to contents that Palestinians share online. Leading to the arrest and detention of hundreds of Palestinians, this approach has been paralleled by the latest Palestinian Authority’s (PA) restrictive law on cybercrime that, in defiance of basic digital rights, further seizes and deteriorates spaces of dissent. Moreover, with information and data being channeled through fewer and fewer platforms, authorities’ control over content becomes gradually facilitated, also thank to existing partnerships with companies managing large quantities of data. At the same time, free online spaces (such as darknet and anonymous I2P networks) tend to disappear at the altar of infrastructural commercialization, and users’ limited computer literacy. In this spirit, disruptive engagements – such as traditional hacking and cyberwar – are being relegated to a narrow phenomenological niche. In a context where both Israeli and PA’s practices tighten the ‘vise’ over Palestinian cyberspace through the continuous fine tuning of jaws of censorship and control, online activism (and critical engagement in general) somehow appears to facilitate the occupation rather than disabling its articulation online. Departing from these empirical considerations, this article engages with the concept of jihad to reflect on alternative ways, and extents, in which internet technologies can be re-appropriated and deployed on behalf of disruptive politics in Palestine and beyond.

This paper discusses the importance of Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram to the global formation and circulation of Iranian protest literature in the early twenty-first century. In the 2009 protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election, the migration of Iranian poets to Twitter, and the new genre of the tweet, led to an elaborate network of social connections in the online space, where relationality could flourish without explicit personal identity. The tweet’s ephemerality created a literary form that proved uniquely flexible in a climate of political persecution and censorship, because it was both personal and expressive, and potentially anonymous. Hashtags, memes, and gifs added further intermedial richness and virtual embodiment to Twitter as a platform for collective expression and organization, blurring the boundaries between activism in digital and physical space. I draw on Negar Mottahedeh’s central study #iranelection for this part of the paper. In the age of Trump, however, it is difficult to argue for Twitter as a liberating medium or utopian space of free expression. The platform is now deeply associated with trolls, doxers, hate groups, and the US President’s own brand of inflammatory, accusatory monologues, which frequently center around Islamophobic sentiment and stereotype. Trump is not the only world leader to use social media as an unconventional political mouthpiece: Sheikh Mohammed of UAE, for example, posted an Instagram poem (which went viral) in the summer of 2017 as a means of urging Qatar to adhere to Saudi demands. In light of this shift to a more authoritarian Twitter, the second half of my paper examines the diversification of more recent Iranian dissident speech across platforms, notably Telegram and Instagram. I will address various mediums’ abilities to use proxy servers and circumvent censorship, and close-read the aesthetic effects of image-centric versus text-centric platforms, as well as various configurations of authorship and “following,” on the efficacy of these social media as protest tools. I will simultaneously discuss the diversification of causes of protest in Iran, which are now harder to categorize than the youth-oriented, female-dominated, mostly upper-middle class, urban protests of 2009. Even as Twitter quickly gives way to other platforms, I ultimately argue that online intertextuality will continue to play a crucial role for Iranian protest literature as a particular node in global dissident and poetic networks.

In her book The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed introduced the term feminist killjoy to describe the negative space that feminism occupies in contemporary discourse. “The feminist killjoy” she writes, “‘spoils’ the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness. In the thick sociality of everyday spaces, feminists are thus attributed as the origin of the bad feeling, as the ones who ruin the atmosphere…” In this paper, I look at the presence of the feminist killjoy in popular webcomics from the Arab world, focusing specifically on Comicskilljoy. Created by Beirut-based Maia Hel in March 2017, the series is distributed via a Facebook page that has already garnered more than 17,000 likes, usually receiving hundreds of shares for each post. Hel repurposes pop art images found on the internet—often featuring variations of the melodramatic “damsel in distress” theme—and superimposes them with feminist messages in Arabic. Comicskilljoy addresses ongoing and pressing social issues in the Arab world, both in Lebanon and beyond, that affect the everyday realities of women: toxic masculinity, patriarchy, sexism, colorism, microaggressions, harassment, and even poor road infrastructures in major cities such as Beirut and Cairo. Recent posts respond to the social media campaign #metoo, and the controversial events in Egypt following Mashrou‘ Laila’s concert where several concert goers were arrested for carrying LGBT symbols. By imbuing the images with new meanings, Elhelou gestures towards the killjoy’s ability to “to make room for possibility, for chance.” In a description of her work Hel writes that the “comics aim to expel from my body the patriarchal venom I am injected with everyday.” I seek to examine Comicskilljoy as a case of “digital dissidence” by tracing reactions and sharing patterns, and exploring how its circulation opens up meaningful spaces of encounter and exchange across regional boundaries. A close-reading of this project will also allow me to consider a range of broader questions: How do social media platforms create space for public protest? In what ways has the rise of comics, graphic novels and other visual means of expression following the popular uprisings intersected with ongoing feminist issues? What are the measures of effectiveness concerning feminist meme production and political cartoons? How can popular culture and humor function as a form of political resistance against heteronormative and hegemonic structures in the Arab world?