پژوهشهای راهبردی مسائل اجتماعی ایران (Dec 2022)
Phenomenological Exploration of Sexuality Experienced by Females Left Behind during Their Husbands’ Migration in Lar City
Abstract
Introduction Sexual needs are regulated and routined as one of the most important biological-instinctive needs in the fabric of social-cultural networks. In Iran, one of the most customary and legitimate channels to satisfy such biological needs is family formation via marriage. New industrial developments and long-term geographical-demographic motilities resulting from them have provided the basis for a group of women, who are left behind due to their husbands’ migration for a long time. Thus, they are forced to live away from their husbands in their hometowns for a long period of time (a period of 6 months or more than a year). Although these women’s qualities of life can be explored in several dimensions, their sexuality concerns and experiences are of the most important and relatively unknown issues. Explicating their experiences of extra-marital sexual relations in the Iranian society where the bond of marriage is considered sacred and customary based on Sharia and the governing legal system has double importance since these experiences can lead to severe individual, social, and legal consequences. Sexual desire is defined as the sum of forces that move us towards a sexual behavior or away from it. The present research aimed to analyze sexual desire perception of a group of women, who were left behind due to their husbands’ migration, in the city of Lar. Lar City is located in the south of Fras Province and Lari men migrate to the Persian Gulf countries in order to find a job. With their international migration, their wives, who are left for a time, encounter many problems and challenges, including sexual issues. Due to sensitivity to this subject, researching on which is a taboo in Iran, a qualitative research, particularly a phenomenological study, was recognized to be suitable for exploring these women’s perceptions and lived experiences of sexuality. Based on the research logic, the main questions formulated were as follows: How do the Lari women left behind due to their husbands’ migration understand their sexual needs? How do their sexual needs are regulated and managed, while their husbands are present or absent? What are their most important concerns regarding their sexual needs and affairs? What are their self- perceptions and self-experiences of others’ sexual practices? Materials & Methods Due to the importance and extreme sensitivity of the issue, the lived experiences of sexuality of 14 women, who had been left behind because of their husbands’ migration in Lar City, were studied phenomenologically in this essay. The participants were chosen based on a non-probable and targeted sampling method. In addition, to understand the experiences and perceptions of the women with different characteristics, the criterion of maximum diversity was considered in the selection of samples. The diverse criteria included age, duration of husband's presence and absence, participant’s level of education, number of children, etc. The interviewees and data were linked via a kind of zigzagging and non-linear analysis. Before conducting the interviews, the rationale and purpose of the research were explained to the participants. Their informal consents to participate in the interviews were considered. The mean duration of the unstructured and semi-structured interviews in some cases was 75-90 minutes. The participants’ voices were recorded with their permissions. The interviews were conducted in person and by phone during December of 2021 to September of 2022. The procedure was taken as follows: After each interview, the recorded conversations were first implemented verbatim on paper and then analyzed as soon as possible. Afterwards, some other people were selected and interviewed based on the logic of maximum diversity or snowball sampling. The interviews were continued until their topics were felt to be almost repetitive and no new points were expressed by the participants. The data analysis was done by implementing 7 methodological steps according to Collaizi’s thematic analysis method. Discussion of Results & Conclusion: The studied women's experiences of sexuality could be explored and described under 3 central themes: 1) conscious management of high mental-sexual obsession; 2) concerned curiosity about husband's sexual relationship; and 3) sexualization of social relations. These themes were explicated under more minor sub-themes and clusters. As the broadest theme, conscious management of high mental-sexual obsession reflected this perception that these women used alternative strategies, such as repressing and sublimating themselves through more legitimate socially-culturally channels, such as reading, praying, hanging out with children, etc. Regarding their worries about their husbands’ sexual relationships, they tried to justify themselves in any ways by thinking that they trusted their husbands completely, their husbands were not involved in these activities, or they are too busy to think about such things. Sexualization of social relations represented the experience that these women were known as lonely women, who themselves had to constantly monitor their relationships with strange and non-familiar men, in their living places in order to keep themselves from being known as sexualized women and thus not being stigmatized or famed as promiscuous women. In general, the left-behind women's qualities of sexual life had some ups and downs, while they had to manage their lives in this small society and adapt themselves to this social context.
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