Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Department of Social Sciences, Razavi University of Islamic Sciences, Mashhad, Iran
2 PhD student of Women's Studies at University of Religions and Denominations, Qom, Iran
Abstract
The changes and developments of women's identity have been one of the most important issues of Iranian society after facing the modern western civilization. To understand these developments, we can analyze the developments that tried to establish social order. In the contemporary period of Iran, although Reza Khan's idea of forced modernization started in the early 1300s, but almost with the beginning of the construction (development) programs (1327) during the period of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the peak of their implementation since 1341(third program), the social order Western capitalism is expanding significantly in Iran. In this article, we have tried to show, relying on the analysis of development programs especially since 1341, that the social order of Iranian society has faced many challenges and under these challenges, women's identity has also been subjected to these changes. Furthermore, we have used to the critical theory of the Frankfurt school, which was formulated in Europe at the same time as the implementation of the capitalist development programs in Iran, for analyzed the social condition resulting from the implementation of these programs in Iran and have paid attention the cultural situation regarding the female identity. However, our usage from this theory, due to the fact that it takes place in the historical context of Iranian society, is only focused on the relationship between cultural developments and the capitalist order; With considering the role played by religious forces in Iran, the response of Iranian society to this identity challenge is different from the response of the Frankfurt school to the same phenomenon in Europe. From this point of view, in this article, we will pursue the analysis of women's identity with the focus on cultural components under the cultural aspect of capitalist development programs. This attention will help us to find out how the cultural politics of the second Pahlavi tried to advance the hard and physical politics of Reza Khan Pahlavi with more success; This is despite the fact that most of the researches that have been carried out about women's identity in contemporary Iran have focused on Reza khan’s policy of unveiling and have not considered the policies of Pahlavi II. For this purpose, the representation of women's identity through the influence of cinematographic works as a part of cultural policies was researched in this article. In order to advance the goals of the article, the method of discourse analysis has been used with laclau and mouffe's approach. This method was chosen because, on the one hand, it is compatible with the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and on the other hand, it can show the mutual relationship between the historical background affected by the development of capitalism in this period and the text of the movies. laclau and mouffe's approach was also adopted due to the consideration of social phenomena and the possibility of analyzing this phenomenon. In this approach, it considers not only language but all social phenomena in the discourse, and because of its abstract level, it has more constructivism and provides the possibility of analyzing this phenomenon in the historical period in question. We followed up the findings of this research in three historical stages; First, the formation of the second Pahlavi government and the coming to power of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi until the beginning of the first construction program (1327), second, the historical period of the implementation of construction (development) programs from 1327 to Mehrdad Pahlbod's ministry in the Ministry of Culture and Arts in 1343 and the period after that, the period of 1343 until the Islamic Revolution. After these cases, we also analyzed the new wave of Iranian cinema according to the topic. In the first period of time, the development programs were not yet discussed in its codified form, and during this period, due to the impact of the Second World War and the resulting conditions for the country, most foreign films were screened in order to protect the interests of the United States and England and in competition with the Germans. During these years, the establishment of cinemas increased and it was used to maintain and stabilize the government with advertising programs. These cases and other conditions that need more time to mention show the great impact of western culture on Iranian society through the cinema industry. It was after this period that development programs were begin and during these programs, cultural development was pursued through the promotion of some mentioned components through effective media such as cinema. By analyzing other historical periods, we found that in these cinema works, the government tried to use women and female identity as a tool, in the form of addressing sexual character or physical attractiveness and embodiment, in the form of the central discourse sign of "reducing the female identity to body and her appearances" and "inducing being modern with the disclosure of sexual appearances" will eliminate the traditional resistance of Iranian society against the imported culture of the Western bloc. During the formation of the new wave of Iranian cinema, which was influenced by the new wave of French cinema, changes were made in the style of films in opposition to Persian-films. Although Iranian new wave cinema was not able to break the common atmosphere of Iranian cinema, at least in terms of female identity, it tried to provide a broader meaning of female identity and based on more humane concepts. Therefore, it is possible to imagine the discourse sign of "the development of female identity in a new formulation" for new wave cinema. Overall, in terms of discourse analysis, a direct quantitative and qualitative relationship can be seen between the implementation of the capitalistic construction (development) programs of the Pahlavi period and the growing expansion of this representation of female identity. In other words, with the implementation of the development and construction programs of the Pahlavi period, both quantitatively and qualitatively, the representation of western female components in the cinema of this period increased and was defined in opposition to the components of Iranian Muslim female identity. In fact, the implementation of capitalistic development programs during the Pahlavi period was accompanied by the expansion of the representation of western female components and the destruction of traditional Islamic-Iranian female components and strengthened each other. In other words, the representation of female identity in the cinema of this period, from the beginning to the years leading to the Islamic Revolution, has been in an increasing trend towards reducing the identity of women to the body and her appearances, but the second Pahlavi state, especially in the Ministry of Culture and Art, this new female identity, which is influenced by the identity of the western woman, is drawn as a progressive identity and in line with development in a western way.
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