The reception of Instagram users of the “traditionalist women” discourse

This study aims to investigate the discourse about traditionalist women on a popular social media platform, i.e. Instagram. Therefore, ‘Tašt-e Šir’ video which was part of a television program about family values was selected as the case study. In this video, a family counselor, advised women to express their love and affection to their husbands through washing their spouse’s feet in a tub of water or milk. The video became very controversial and was distributed vastly on different types of social media including Instagram. The main question of the paper is the discourse about women that are represented on this video. In addition, this study seeks to understand the reception of Instagram users from this discourse according to the Hall encoding-decoding theory. Critical discourse analysis based on the Fairclough model was conducted to answer the first question. A qualitative content analysis was used to answer the second question. The results of the study show ‘traditionalist women’ being the dominant discourse on the video. The results also show that ‘oppositional code' is the dominant reception among Instagram users.