The Discursive Construction of Women’s Identity in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Official and Unofficial Discourses through the Lens of Laclau and Mouffe

Abstract

This study examines the discursive construction of women’s identity in post-revolutionary Iran by comparing official and unofficial discourses through the theoretical framework of Laclau and Mouffe. Adopting a qualitative, interpretive-critical, and poststructuralist approach, the study analyzes how competing systems of meaning construct different female subject positions and struggle to stabilize the meanings of key concepts related to gender, rights, family, morality, and social participation. The empirical corpus consisted primarily of 22 semi-structured interviews with Iranian women occupying diverse institutional, professional, cultural, and civil positions, supplemented by selected official documents and relevant cultural texts. The analysis focused on nodal points, articulation, chains of equivalence, floating signifiers, antagonistic boundaries, othering, and hegemonic struggle. The findings revealed two broad discursive formations. The official governmental-religious discourse was organized around the nodal point of the “elevated family,” within which women’s identities were articulated through motherhood, wifehood, chastity, religious commitment, and socially legitimate participation compatible with family responsibilities. In contrast, the unofficial modern-critical discourse was organized around the nodal point of the “right to choose and individual agency,” emphasizing autonomy, economic independence, bodily self-determination, equal legal recognition, and freedom from coercive gender norms. The strongest areas of discursive antagonism concerned floating signifiers such as freedom, women’s dignity, gender justice, hijab, family, and economic independence. Although official discourse retained substantial institutional power, the findings indicated increasing instability in its capacity to monopolize meaning at the level of lived experience. The emergence of dual and hybrid identities further demonstrated that women do not necessarily identify completely with either discourse. The study concludes that women’s identity in contemporary Iran is an open and contested field shaped by continuous hegemonic struggles over the meaning of legitimate womanhood.