Discursive Sexism in Persian Joke

Over the past six decades looking for linguistic manifestations of sexism has been a noticeable trend in linguistics. The theoretical motivation for this unprecedented interest is an insight put forward by critical linguists in terms of which linguistic events can affect social structures and at the same time, being affected by them. It is in the light of this view that looking for linguistic instantiations of sexism can gain a significance which goes beyond the language itself. Looking for gender inequality in those linguistic products which are tightly associated with popular culture can potentially lead us to the underlying social order which has given rise to them. Jokes, which are prototypical examples of such linguistic products, are the focus of this study. Based on the framework of critical linguistics we aim to identify and explain manifestations of discursive sexism in Persian jokes in terms of the social order witch constitute them. To this end, nine indicators of sexism in jokes have been elicited, and measured in a corpus of popular Persian jokes. The corpus-based analysis shows that instances of sexist discourse are highly frequent in Persian joke-telling culture; Moreover, the findings show that sexism in jokes cannot be reduced to those jokes which are “obviously” sexist in their humor, and the linguistic-structural manifestations of sexist discourse can be found in the whole Persian joke-telling culture and beyond the scope of sexist jokes.