Abstract
This study adopts a multidimensional approach to examine the representation of gender bias in twenty selected films from Iranian social movies across four decades (1980s–2010s). Drawing on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis for the linguistic dimension and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Design Grammar for the visual dimension, 200 dialogue-centered scenes between male and female characters were analyzed. The findings reveal a clear male-dominated pattern in the 1980s, with full control over both language and image. In the 1990s, women appeared more frequently on screen, yet their linguistic agency remained limited. The 2000s marked a relative balance, with more diverse roles and increased female participation in both dialogue and visual representation. However, the 2010s witnessed a paradoxical shift: although women occupied central positions on screen, their linguistic agency declined and narratives continued to be structured from a predominantly male perspective. Overall, the study demonstrates that Iranian social movies simultaneously reflects and reproduces the socio-cultural dynamics of each decade, while continuously reconfiguring both explicit and implicit mechanisms of male dominance.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Gender, Gender Bias, Iranian Social Movies, Visual Design Grammar.
Introduction
Language and image are two primary tools for representing social reality, particularly in cinema, where they function to interpret, reconstruct, and assign meaning to the world. As a cultural and ideological discourse, cinema extends beyond entertainment and plays a fundamental role in shaping social norms, values, and cognitive frameworks. One of its most significant representational dimensions is gender. Through dialogue and visual imagery, cinema can reinforce or challenge gender stereotypes. Iranian social movies, due to its close engagement with sociocultural and political transformations, provides a valuable context for examining representations of women and men and the gender biases embedded within them .Gender roles in cinema are not merely reflections of social reality but discursive constructions produced through language, visual representation, and dominant ideologies. Gender bias emerges when women and men are positioned unequally in terms of agency, power, and narrative centrality, and it may manifest in both linguistic and visual dimensions. This study investigates patterns of gender-role representation in twenty Iranian social films produced between the 1980s and the 2010s, drawing on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (1995) and Kress and van Leeuwen’s Grammar of Visual Design (2021). It examines linguistic indicators of power—such as interruptions, imperative and obligational constructions, and interrogatives—as well as visual elements including actor roles, viewing angle, and salience. By integrating linguistic and visual analysis, the study seeks to determine how gender bias has been represented in Iranian social movies across four decades, how linguistic and visual agency are distributed between female and male characters, and how these patterns can be interpreted in relation to dominant sociocultural and ideological discourses of each period.
Materials and Methods
The data were extracted from both verbal (dialogue) and visual (shot-based) levels. The research sample consists of twenty Iranian social films, with five films selected from each decade between the 1980s and the 2010s, based on rankings from recognized film databases. From each film, ten dialogue-centered sequences featuring interactions between female and male characters were selected. In total, 200 sequences containing 3,257 clauses were analyzed, representing approximately 3.5 hours of film content. To control for the effect of differences in scene length, the analyses were carried out using the proportion of female and male characters’ verbal and visual presence. At the linguistic level, the “clause” was selected as the unit of analysis, following Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, which considers the clause the smallest grammatical unit containing a main verb. At the visual level, the “shot” was used as the unit of analysis, defined as the continuous recording from the activation to the termination of the camera.
Results and Discussion
Analysis of four decades of Iranian social movies shows that language and image do not operate in parallel; instead, patterns of explicit bias, relative balance, and implicit bias emerge across periods. The 1980s display overt patriarchal dominance, with women marginalized and men controlling both dialogue and visual action. In the 1990s, women gain visual visibility but remain linguistically marginalized, indicating a gap between visibility and discursive power. The 2000s mark a period of relative balance, as women achieve greater agency in both speech and visual representation. In the 2010s, implicit bias reappears: women are visually foregrounded yet remain limited in narrative progression through language. Linguistic evidence further shows that confrontational questioning by female characters may paradoxically reinforce implicit bias by relying on self-deprecating language. Moreover, women’s agency often remains framed within stereotypical roles, with narratives frequently portraying them as reacting to male domination. This pattern normalizes male authority and suggests that increased visibility has not produced fundamental change in gender representation.
Conclusion
Findings show persistent gender bias, varying from overt male dominance in the 1980s to subtle visual prominence of women but reduced linguistic agency in the 2010s. Men guided the narrative across all decades, particularly at the verbal level, whereas women were primarily confined to visual presence. Gender representation closely mirrored political and cultural shifts: male-centered ideology in the 1980s, reformist social openings in the 1990s, growing civil engagement in the 2000s, and “representational duality” in the 2010s. The study underscores that increased visual visibility of women does not guarantee enhanced narrative agency, indicating that latent gender biases persist beneath surface-level changes.