Mechanisms of Legitimation to the Gendered Discourses in Mahmoud Dolatabadi’s “Solok” Novel

own self dimensions and delegitimize the others’ elements; legitimation, from the semiotic-discursive point of view, is a process that hegemonizes power through discourse articulation. The authors’ aim in this paper is to investigate and identify the way in which the legitimating mechanisms of gendered discourses function in contemporary Persian story literature. Hence, they provide a deconstructive reading of the methodology of Van Leeuwen (2007) based on Laclau and Mouffe (2001) and Derrida (1983) and take advantage of a variety of linguistic tools. Then, in order to analyze the functions of these mechanisms, they go through the “Solok” and purposefully examine some of its parts. Finally, they respond to the research question about how the legitimizing mechanisms of gendered discourses operate and introduce four structures, i.e. simple, compound, complex, and chain, in those mechanisms. Moreover, they show that after gaining and achieving the legitimacy, the gendered discourses step forward to maintain and fix the legitimacy and delegitimize the other explicitly and implicitly- by the way of recontextualization.