Phenomenology of Women Gender Roles in their approaching virtual social networks

Genesis as well as consequent transformations happened in virtual social networks has contribution in emergence of distinct gender roles among women. Cyberspace consumption has been associated with opportunities and threats for women. The purpose of the study is to describe the experience of housewives’ gender roles as well as investigation of backgrounds relating to mentioned experience through implementation of descriptive phenomenology as the research method. The main question is how the gender roles is experienced by housewives while approaching virtual social networks. Married women of 28–56-year-old living in Shahr-e-Rey were selected purposefully on the basis of predetermined inclusion criterion as the research informants. Data seeking has been done through twenty semi structured interviews. Data analysis and exploration in participants’ experiences was done on the basis of employment of Collaizi method. Research question mentioned above was answered in the form of 3 final themes including Hyper-realized matrimony, online spousal, and software-oriented emotional motherhood. Other ten main themes in this regard included sexual hyperreality- based exploited in silence, online infidelity phobia, being mannequin desire, sexual conscious and pleasure sharing, online household management, visible state of being subject, state of intertwined fear, hope and reflexivity in virtual life, online motherhood governance, dying traditional motherhood, helpful teacher-mother and dreadful motherhood. The above stated themes represent various dimensions of experience related to gender roles in three scopes of matrimony, spousal arrangements as well as motherhood. Interpretative analysis of main discovered themes has been provided with special reference to selected statements of informants expressed in semi-structured interviews. The conclusion of present paper has been interpretatively articulated on the basis of the highest level of abstraction with reference to research conceptual framework, review of previous related studies and empirical findings of the current research as well.