Representation of Women in the Discourse of Women’s Rights Activists in Iran

This study aims at analyzing the main discourses in competition among opponents and proponents of women’s labor and sports. Through a quantitative and qualitative descriptive-analytic method, it studies how women are represented in different discourses in competition, and among male and female speakers. The data is a corpus gathered through library method including 16 texts of the female and male opponents and proponents during the past 5 years selected through random sampling. The results show traditional and modern discourses are in competition. Opponents mostly refer to traditional discourse, and proponents to the modern. In traditional discourse of the opponents, women are represented by stereotypical roles such as “mother, wife, Kadbanu (a good housewife), housewife, child bearer, parent, responsible for the raising of the children, dependent on their husbands. The importance of the role of women in the family is common among the traditional and modern viewpoints. However, proponents emphasize the role of woman in the society too. Taboo words such as “adultery, rape, prostitution, sex dealers and etc, and ideological words such as chastity, purity, revolution and referring to woman’s’ age for marriage are just used in male’s speeches, and they used Islam/ Muslim more than women.