analyzing women’s representation in contemporary iranian painting

the aim of this article is to analyze representation of women in contemporary iranian painting. as the approach of cultural studies shows, a representation is never a pure reflection of reality; rather, it portrays reality in a specific way in order to reproduce the dominant hidden discourse. therefore, this research aims to decode women’s portrayals in order to discover the hidden ideology in works of male and female painters. the theoretical approach of this article is based on studying the strategies which women use in their paintings in order to prevent becoming, in foucault’s words, a subject of the male discourse. these strategies include visual techniques which challenge the expected ideas in facing women’s portraits. the study includes decoding the portraits drawn by women and men, and emphasizing on the meaning layers of power and resistance in the works. the methodological approach of this article is semiotics, and its method is content analysis using the technique of a reversed questionnaire which was designed according to binary oppositions of meanings used in the works. the questionnaire is designed based on decoding explicit and implicit significations in paintings about women, which includes undertaking a semiotic analysis of male and female painters. thus the meanings are arranged based on the binary opposition, which is an experimental study of paintings based on counting the repetition of meanings in the works of male and female painters. the research statistical sample includes 142 paintings portraying women exhibited during the last two years in active galleries of tehran. the main hypothesis of this article is about the existence of a meaningful difference between the paintings drawn by female and male painters. the strategies which explain two different masculine and feminine subjectivities are examined in 9 categories and 30 binaries including: sexual performance/desexualized performance, subjective strategies/objective strategies, descriptive/explanatory, natural/cultural, generalized/particularized. probing into such binaries poses the question of how men using descriptive signs in representing women reproduce their masculine dominant discourse of culture with sexualized, subjective, naturalistic, generalized visual strategies. on the other hand, the issue as to how women using explanatory signs resist the masculine discourse with desexualized, objective, particularized visual strategies is examined. the findings show that the portrait of women in the paintings created by men is based on a system of descriptive, iconic and stereotypical signs, while women painters have an explanatory, non-stereotypical, an interpretive vision towards characteristics and the real conditions of women. in paintings of men the reference to women is an implicational, symbolic, and mythic reference which does not aim at femininity, but rather points to feminine characteristics and the implicit meaning and subjectivity of being a woman; and thus portray woman’s beauty and elegance. on the contrary in women’s paintings, the representation of women is based on feminine experience explaining the shortcomings of women’s life-world, while men’s paintings disregard these conditions and portray women in an imaginary space. the study of iran’s contemporary paintings show that for women, a woman’s painting is a field of resistance against the masculine subjectivity and, in foucault’s words, is a war against subjectivization of the woman. women painters attempt to deconstruct the visual form which men have constructed about women. they resist subjectivization, and using new visual strategies, create gaps in the reproduction of masculine dominant culture.