Semantic Understanding of the Identity Formation Process of Women in Yasuj City with a Postmodern Approach

Abstract

This article employs a feminist perspective to investigate the process of identity formation among women in the city of Yasuj. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 27 women from this city to collect and analyze data using the Strauss and Corbin grounded theory method. The causal conditions section's findings suggest that gendered othering, restriction of choices, hegemonic patriarchy, religious authority discourse, and the social reproduction of gender influence women's identities. Moreover, the discursive normative system, religious symbolic order, gendered embodiment, hegemonic dress code, and gendered family system are identified as contextual conditions that significantly contribute to the stabilization of the traditional identity of women. However, institutional gender discrimination, normative deterrence, intra-family power relations, the representation of body control, and patriarchal capitalism are abstracted as codes of intervening conditions. The study examines the influence of power discourses on women's identity and describes the role of resistance and acquiescence in the formation of women's identities in the strategies section. Positive outcomes (identity and embodiment reconstruction, resistance against dominant discourses, autonomy, and body control), mixed outcomes (resistance and acceptance discourse, role duality, subject and social order conflict), and negative outcomes (power discourse and social surveillance, loss of autonomy, internalization of norms) are the three categories into which the consequences of this phenomenon are classified.

Keywords

• grounded theory method
• identity conflict
• patriarchy
• traditional identity
• women's identity formation