Critical Discourse Analysis of “Blue Scarf”

This paper is an attempt to study gender roles and the way they are represented in Blue Scarf, a movie by Rakhshan Bani Etemad, in a CDA framework. The authors will discuss how patriarchal system as a discourse benefits from visual system of representation to produce meaning and to marginalize the competitive “other”. The authors assume that the patriarchal discourse is constructed ideologically and as the dominant discourse from one hand, it includes some sub-discourses and on the other hand it is not innocent in representation of the cultural, social and even biological facts. The source of our data is the screen play. Halliday’s Functional Systematic Grammar and Fairclough’s approach in Critical Discourse Analysis are the bases of this analysis. Those elements which have had some direct or indirect correlations with unjust distribution of power will be analyzed. It is evident that visual signs also play a very significant role in naturalization of gender discrimination but here we only discuss the verbal aspects of the discourse. It seems that while it is assumed that movies made by female filmmakers should have a feminist approach and should have a critical look at the patriarchal discourse, this study shows that female filmmakers also may unconsciously have a masculine look because of immediate transition of hegemonic masculine traditions.