Analysis of marriage discourses in contemporary Iran (from 1960s to this decate)

The concept of Marriage has changed during recent decades in contemporary Iran, therefore individuals feel that they have more freedom to define and build their meaning of it and choose how to look at it. Based on this changing concept many writers have written a lot on marriage and have tried to modernize its components. These various writings has motivated me, as a researcher, to conduct a research on this hot topic and analyse them. The main question of this research is what are the main current discourses in Iran and how and why they have appeared and dominated the Iranian society, since 1960s until now. the population of the study is all books that were recorded in the National Library under the keyword marriage from 1960s through this decade. The theoretical framework for this research has been Laclau’s and Mouffe’s deconstruction theory and discourse semiotics model, thus I have applied it to analyze books at three levels of textual, intertextual, and contextual analysis. Each of these discourses was examined in four dimensions: philosophical, individual, social, and cognitive. The chapters of this dissertation were divided into six periods based on the contextual analysis: pre-revolution, post-revolution until the end of Iran-Iraq war, Construction period, Reformation period, fundamentalism, and the Moderation period. The results of the study have shown that the themes of religious- Islamic discourse have not changed over the past six decades, such as sexual instinct gratification, reproduction, relaxation, act of nature, and following the practice of the Prophet’s Muhammad tradition. Reproductive attitudes and sexual instinct satisfaction in this discourse make the desirable wife known as the wife who obeys the sexual needs of her husband, submissive, housewife and childbearing. In this discourse, essentialism is prominent, and the differences between man and woman are seen as natural and unchangeable, and the desire for marriage is innate and intrinsic. As scientific discourse has become more modernized from the Reformation period onwards, individuality has been taken into consideration, and “self”, self-awareness and self-knowledge in marriage have been appeared as ruling themes. From this point of view, the woman is no longer just a housewife and a baby sitter, rather, love has the lion share in the marriage institution.