Depiction of ordinary women of “Femininity” through Conceptual Metaphors on Farsi Instagram

To study every culture, different approaches and tools are applied. A tool to study a society's culture is to analyze and identify the concepts of its culture. One of the basic cultures in every society is feminine & femininity. By studying the conceptual statements in a language on the feminine & femininity, one can find out the feminine's cognition system. This paper aims to study the way of feminine conceptualization by ordinary women on Instagram and their understanding of femininity experience & basic metaphors which interconnect the meanings of femininity. To realize the paper aim, by applying cognitive linguistics approaches, particularly the theories of Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M, answer to these questions: 1. what metaphors are constructed by ordinary women speaking Persian on the feminine & femininity on Instagram social network? 2. Which macro conceptual domains are the bases of semantic construction by ordinary women speaking Persian on the feminine & femininity on Instagram? 3. Which source domain (the conceptual domain from which we draw metaphorical expressions) is the most used by ordinary women speaking Persian for the target domain of the feminine & femininity on Instagram. Target domain is the conceptual domain that we try to understand. The virtual ethnography called netnography has been applied to gather the research data and MIP (metaphor identification procedure) to analyze the data. By analyzing the shared posts on Instagram by 90 selected ordinary women. 250 conceptual metaphors were extracted which have been categorized in 11 macro conceptual domains.