Containment Vs Dissident Reading: Female Resistance to Patriarchal Hegemony in the Folklore Kuridsh Tale of "Khaj and Siamand"

Traditional societies had a patriarchal structure at the beginning of the modern era. The extent of patriarchal norms and the domination of what Michel Foucault called the "regime of truth" in the traditional epoch tried to consider women as an object and in this way to keep women under men's control. Women's resistance to patriarchal hegemony and the fate of women's resistance to the domination of this ideology in literary works has become a point of confrontation between the New Historicist Stephen Greenblatt, and Cultural Materialist Alan Sinfield. The former believes that women's opposition to the dominant discourse and patriarchal ideology is ultimately digested by the dominant ideology. On the other hand, Sinfield and other cultural materialists are optimistic about the outcome of this confrontation. According to them, women's resistance to patriarchal ideology demonstrate dissidence being incorporated, necessarily, with reference to dominant structures and it can ultimately lead to the discontinuity of patriarchal hegemony. This study aims to explore the consequence of women's resistance in the folklore tale of "Khaj and Siamand" based on the New historicism and Cultural Materlism readings. The former considers that women's resistance is suppressed by the ruling hegemony while the cultural materialists assert that challenging the patriarchal hegemony yields questioning the patriarchy. Thus, woman is no longer a passive object in the hands of male-dominated ideology, but she becomes an active subject. Women can make their own identity and rule their own destiny.