On Representation of the Concept of Feminism in Iranian Media: A Conservative Strandpoint from Iran
On Representation of the Concept of Feminism in Iranian Media: A Conservative Strandpoint from Iran

Summary/Abstract: Although Iranian women have been involved with women rights issues for the past century, there seems to be a general resistance against using the label “feminist” among women activists in the country. While some women activists may associate themselves with “Islamic Feminism”, a lot of them prefer to drop the label “feminism” all together. Although there may be many reasons behind disavowal of feminism in a conservative Islamic society like that of Iran, one cannot deny the power of media in creating and shaping a particular stance toward feminism. The present paper elaborates on the discursive representation of the concept of feminism in Fars News agency which is one of the main conservative news agencies in Iran. The results are drawn from a 450,000 word corpus of Persian news texts on feminism published by Fars News Agency from 2006 to 2012. Wordsmith concord feature was used to look for collocates of the search term feminism in the corpus. The collocates were then hypothetically categorized into various semantic groups and further analyzed using their contexts from the corpus. The data reiterated the results found in similar studies on feminism in Anglophone media in that feminism has indeed been portrayed in negative terms.

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