A visual representation of the resistance of Iranian users in virtual space against the structure of sanctions (Case study: visual reaction of Iranian users in virtual space to Nike sanction on Iran’s football team)

he Iranian users’ conception of the discursive system of sanctions. The question that follows is how the Iranian users in virtual space responded to the Nike’s sanction on Iran football team in 2018 World Cup by the language of picture and gave an unbiased reading of sanction system order. The sanction system is a discourse-based hegemonic system whose scope and influence goes beyond the military, security, political spheres and related fields such as nuclear technology and spreads also to the social and cultural life of citizens, and also affects the social identity-maker and integrity-maker aspects such as sport and health through the politicization of the various parts of the citizens’ life. Using visual semiotics, prioritizing non-linguistic factors in portraying the ideology of sanctions, this research investigated the activity of users on Instagram, Twitter and other social networks, and through semiotic analysis of related pictures in virtual space achieved the result that the importation of sanctions into social and cultural life of citizens is a kind of new disciplinary discourse and ‘symbolic violence’ that seeks to make citizens’ life an object of power. In the course of sanctions, the power and resistance and hegemony and anti- hegemony act simultaneously, so that the Iranian users, resorting to semiotic excess and the path of ‘semiotic resistance’, attains the enjoy of political affair leisurization. 

According to Foucault, discourse works through the law of penal systems. The sanctions regime is also a discourse order that advances its mechanism in a hegemonic and ideological context. The sanction system is a discourse-based hegemonic system whose scope and influence goes beyond the military, security, political spheres and related fields such as nuclear technology and spreads also to the social and cultural life of citizens, and also affects the social identity-maker and integrity-maker aspects such as sport and health through the politicization of the various parts of the citizens’ life. This article emphasizes that the embargo regime serves the hegemony of the neo-emperor by using discursive tools. One of the signs of the inhumanity and immorality of this new system of domination is not excluding the fields of medicine and health, sports, passenger airlines and other "non-political parts of daily life" that are directly linked to the health and psychological security of citizens' lives. By studying the visual reaction of Iranian users to the boycott of the Iranian football team by Nike in the 2018 World Cup under the pretext of international sanctions against the Iranian government, the present study deals with the visual signs of users' resistance to the sanctions system. The visual reaction of the Iranian people to the boycott of their country's football team by Nike is studied as politics as a form of popular culture. 

In our project, we employed a qualitative research method , it uses semiotics as a "qualitative interpretive" method to reread the images of users against the preferred meaning of the sanctions system. This case study analyzes the visual language of users in virtual space against the boycott of the Iranian football team by Nike in the World Cup. By viewing Instagram pages, Telegram messenger channels and Twitter pages during the 2018 World Cup with online search tools and targeted sampling techniques, this article has extracted images related to the sanction of the Iranian football team in 100 pages in these three virtual platforms.

The results of this study show that the  most important Binary opposition in coded image texts are "Iranian team against Spanish team", "Amiri against Pique", "Nike shoes against Adidas shoes", "Nike shoes against national shoes". For example, Iranian users have shown a kind of humorous reaction in contrasting images, referring to Pique who used Nike products. Nike's slogan, "Just do it" has a meaningful connection with the scene of Nutmeg to Pique by one of the players of the Iranian football team. Iranian users have described Nike's products as not suitable for "success" but for "disgusting" in order to criticize Nike's actions regarding the sanctions of Iran's football team. With semiotic resistance against the sanctions regime, Iranian users are trying to remove themselves from being a subject against the sanctions regime and are resisting the "action of calling" ideology and accepting the status of subject. Users of virtual networks not only resist preferred meanings with the help of conflicting coding, but also produce new and different texts themselves. One of the ways of users' resistance is " Semiotic excess" proposed by Fisk.

This article, in the context of cultural and media studies and with a critical view, has dealt with the dimension of resistance of Iranian cyberspace users in confronting the spread of the sanctions structure from the political sphere to the public sphere. "Sanction Regime" is a type of modern repression system that uses the structure of symbolic and hegemonic violence in contrast to the modern and democratic image it presents and clearly does not separates the political from the civil spheres such as sports, health and education. Nike's announcement that the Iranian football team's players are prohibited from using the company's shoes and other sports equipment in the 2018 World Cup in Russia due to the implementation of US sanctions against Iran is a proof of the sanctions regime spreading to non-political sectors such as sports and other categories of daily life. The research came to the conclusion that Iranian users, with semiotic resistance against the sanctions of their country's football team, actively use the language of images to resist it. As sanctions the sanctions regime acts in a hegemonic way, the audience also engages in anti-hegemonic behavior against this discourse order with its own opportunities and methods, and from the power of resistance and the possibility of "opposite decoding" In the face of sanctions.