Structural analysis of the semantic system of women's demands in the discourse of the opposition of the Islamic Republic with focusing on the Twitter social media

Social media, especially Twitter, is considered one of the important platforms for the expansion of thesemantic system and IR's opposition activities due to its political importance. The research aims to identify thediscourse context of internal and external opposition currents and the central signifiers used by them regardingfemininity. In addition,the research seeks to identify how much these currents have paid attention to women'sdemands on Twitter from August to October 2022 and from what kind of discourse they have analyzed theseissues. The results show that the internal opposition analyzed women's issues mostly based on the reformist subdiscourse and the foreign opposition analyzed and pursing femininity issues mostly based on the feminist subdiscourse. This indicates that the internal opposition has less attention to women's issues because the internalopposition's tweets with femininity topics before September 16th are less frequent than tweets of the foreignopposition and somehow the follow-up of women's demands in internal opposition discourse is not a centralconcern. But after the death of Mehsa Amini and the beginning of street protests, the number of tweets onfemininity topics from internal opposition has increased and their discourse signifiers have become closer to theforeign opposition currents.