‘You’ and ‘We’ in #WomanLifeFreedom: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Collective Identities and Speech Acts in the Twitter’s Discourse of Iranian Protests

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 32 Number 1 Article 3 June 2025 ‘You’ and ‘We’ in #WomanLifeFreedom: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Collective Identities and Speech Acts in the Twitter’s Discourse of Iranian Protests Kimiya Roohani Lancaster University, Follow this and additional works at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs Part of the Discourse and Text Linguistics Commons, and the Peace and Conflict Studies Commons Recommended Citation Roohani, Kimiya (2025) "‘You’ and ‘We’ in #WomanLifeFreedom: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Collective Identities and Speech Acts in the Twitter’s Discourse of Iranian Protests," Peace and Conflict Studies: Vol. 32: No. 1, Article 3. Available at: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol32/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Peace & Conflict Studies at NSUWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Peace and Conflict Studies by an authorized editor of NSUWorks. For more information, please contact . ‘You’ and ‘We’ in #WomanLifeFreedom: A Corpus-based Discourse Analysis of Collective Identities and Speech Acts in the Twitter’s Discourse of Iranian Protests Abstract This paper applies corpus linguistic discourse analysis to approach the social media discourse of a recent political movement in Iran, known as #WomanLifeFreedom and Mahsa Amini. The movement included vast protests in different parts of Iran and went viral on an international scale. Protesters relied heavily on social media, particularly Twitter, to determine strategies and support each other during the expansive calls. To address the discourse shaped in that platform, a corpus was compiled from the Twitter posts, named Mahsa Amini Tweets Corpus (MATC). Using this data collection and analysis method, the endeavour was to obtain a balance between quantitative and qualitative analyses, which did not receive due attention from the social scientists who have studied the movement ever since it took place. This paper addresses collective ‘you’ and ‘we’ identities through an elaborate analysis of speech acts. Overall, 11 speech act categories specified by first- and second-person plurals resurfaced, and their functions were extracted. Moreover, the identities that Twitter protesters had referred to were recognised to have inclusive and exclusive tendencies; therefore, the implications of forming conflict identities for protesters and Iranian society are discussed. Keywords Keywords: speech acts, collective identity, discourse of protest, Mahsa Amini Author Bio(s) Kimiya Roohani received her Master of Arts in Corpus Linguistics from Lancaster University. She teaches General Linguistics in the English Language Studies Department at the Bahá'í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE). This article is available in Peace and Conflict Studies: https://nsuworks.nova.edu/pcs/vol32/iss1/3 A discourse may be referred to as a situation and metaphorical space for people to interpret a particular aspect of reality and share their ideas about it (Karlberg, 2012). The moment people come to an agreement that opposing a sociopolitical identity is the best way, if not the only means, of changing the social reality of their lives is the dawn of the formation of a discourse of protest. While various forms of protests have emerged all around the globe, specific social and political movements were entangled with the place and role of citizens in the destiny of their nation and their freedom to make fundamental decisions for their societies and personal lives. It has not yet been a decade since the slogans of the political #REZIST movement were chanted in Romania (Gheorghiu, 2019), but a more recent movement in Iran budding from Mahsa Amini’s demise in the aftermath of her arrest for hijab, once again fastened the bond between want of political freedom and social justice that resulted in citizens’ uprising against the government. The movement has been a major spotlight due to its “nationwide” and “spread across social classes” (France-Presse, 2022, para. 3). Said differently, the movement’s significance lies in its expansive protests that took place in different areas of the nation. From the perspective of a person who could observe people in the protests firsthand in Iran, it must be stated that protesters had great hope in their ‘acts’ of protest; they harboured great confidence in each other’s support, for they believed there was a large, ever-expanding ‘we’ that was protesting. This confidence was born in the discourse of protest that participants in Amini's uprising had shaped together. Social media bore the major weight of the discourse, and Twitter has been pointed out as its leading agent (Khorramrouz et al., 2023). Twitter was widely used at the time of the protest, and despite the efforts of government-related campaigns to spread misinformation, Persian Twitter users refused to be misled by such schemes (Kermani, 2023). The Mahsa Amini movement can be viewed from different angles, with political and feministic perspectives having served as the most prominent lenses for analysis thus far. Signs of resistance against gender discrimination, instances of which can be found in inheritance, marriage, divorce, and child custody, later led to a call for a change of regime in symbolic political acts such as artwork, the removal of the Islamic compulsory hijab, cutting hair, and tossing the turbans of the clergymen (Hosseini Goodrich, 2023). In all these oppositional endeavours, women are acknowledged as the “forefront” of the movement according to the photos and videos posted on Instagram (Sabet Sarvestany, 2023, p. 3); this notion evened the road to look into the movement from a feminist perspective (Kohan, 2022). Cai (2023), for instance, names #WomanLifeFreedom as a representation of feminist campaigns in the whole Global South. Women as the main agents of the flow provide a unique opportunity to examine the movement’s historical situation (Rouhi, 2022) and impact on art as a form of activism (Karimi, 2023). To the best of my knowledge, endeavours to analyse the movement from a linguistic strand are yet scarce. One of the efforts bestowed on the subject was the comparison between the graffiti in #WomanLifeFreedom and the slogans chanted when the Islamic Revolution was taking place (Fazlolah Firuzkohi, 2023). However, the linguistic efforts of protesters were not restricted to writings on the wall. Content analysis of Facebook comments revealed that the most frequent themes in the discourse of #WomanLifeFreedom are “women,” “fear,” “support,” and “argument” (Adnan, 2023). Persian Twitter has also been used as a dataset to focus on the debates related to gender equality as well as trigrams representing the grievances of Iranian society (Khorramrouz et al., 2023). With that in mind, this paper aims to examine how the participants in the Mahsa Amini protest who came from diverse backgrounds identified themselves as members of one common group that partici (...truncated)