Imam Khomeini and the construction of a female identity in the Islamic Revolution

The Islamic Revolution of Iran can be identified as the emergence of a discursive transformation in Iranian society. This revolution, not only was indicative of a discursive and semantic transformation in the context of the Iranian society, but also it was able to create a new sign and a new meaning within the context of global discourses; thus, Foucault also mentioned this revolution as "the soul of a world repulsions." The present study for understanding the characteristics of this discursive evolution, aimed to study its most influential theorist, Imam Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Revolution. Given the necessity of creating boundaries for the study of discourse analysis, one of the most controversial discourse disciplines, that is, the discursive order of female identity, was chosen for study in this discourse. At the next phase, according to the macro view and the abstract mapping of discursive articulation, using Laclau and Mouffe's approach, this theory and method was chosen for analyzing the discourse of Imam Khomeini's speeches. According to the findings, the central sign of this discourse is "preservation of chastity and religiosity" and despite the conformity of some of the signs of this discourse with hegemonic discourses in the Western world, such as "social activity" and "freedom," all this is defined around "The preservation of chastity and religiosity" in this discourse, and a meaning different from other discourses is created. This discourse, which emerges in the apparent controversy with the second Pahlavi’s discourse, is also seriously deconstructing its hostile discourse-especially in the case of removing the shame from society- and attempts to marginalize it. Among epistemes that these two conflicting discourses have used to marginalize their rival discourse, are " being foreign", "seeing women as objects", "ignorance", " negligence" and " "approval of prostitution." On the contrary, the well-known fundamental epistemes that these two discourses have used for their hegemony in the Discursive Order of feminine identity include: "belief in progress", "support of freedom", "respect for women", "belief in equality of women and men" and "being civilized".