WOMAN IN CULTURE AND ART (WOMEN'S RESEARCH)
Year:2012 | Volume:3 | Issue:2|Papers Count:7

In this article we examine how Iranian women put an interpretation on Victoria, a very popular satellite TV series on Farsi One channel. Based on Active Audience Theory especially Cross-cultural Consumption, audiences consume media texts in different manners. By using qualitative method and in depth interviews with 30 women, we try to show that watching Victoria series produces a kind of excessive enthusiasm that leads to the emergence of “Love of Watching” or “Watchophilia”. Moreover female audiences of this TV series interpret Victoria’s role (the heroine) as independent and assertive. Presenting an assertive woman filled the female audience with delight. Findings showed that having empathy with the heroine is a strong mechanism in watching TV series. Comparing real conditions of female viewers’ lives with visual text is subject to controversy among them. This process has led to the formation of an active reading around judgments about feminine roles and expectations from it based on show of Victoria’s role.Family, occupation and educational major are variables effective on this kind of reading. Moreover we will try to argue that “drawing comparisons between the viewers and the characters” is the dominant aspect in reading Victoria series among Iranian women.

Feminist art is one of the main branches of art and is a substantial artistic movement in the west during the 20th century whose artists move toward challenging art and its identification in connection to gender.Feminist art considers the whole effective elements on the artwork and subjects as emotional conditions of women, women’s rights, violence and discrimination against women, politics and natural environment. It highlights the point that the whole art world is devoted and dedicated to men.Art history confirms this fact. So from this viewpoint, presenting and answering a series of questions, is inevitable. Questions such as these: Why doesn’t the art history include prominent women? Why is a woman’s dignity and position underestimated in art? In what ways can we promote feminist tendencies in art? Should women’s art be different from the one that is produced by the opposite sex.In such a condition, a group of artists appear in art world with the aim of removing and solving ambiguities and on the other hand challenge the present situation by using their ideas and artistic media.Barbara Kruger, the American photographer, is one of the most prominent examples of this case. Kruger, in fact, moved toward criticizing the current condition by using photos and applying its techniques in favor of expanding women’s tendencies. Her photos hold a hidden reality in the subject that what we see is no longer believable and what is seen is not what that is perceived.This article aims to represent such subject matters by considering women’s attitudes in the present age and by taking a look and analyzing Kruger’s photos, works and beliefs.

The aim of this study is to study the nomad women's indigenous knowledge of housing in tribes of Kalhor Kalhor. The study was a done by qualitative approach, using participatory methods PRA, and focus groups in the Gilan e Gharb city of Kermanshah province. The results were analyzed by content analysis. Purposeful sampling was used for data collection. Findings from real-life context of tribes show that black tents (Syæmall) and Kolas are divisible by the space of the black tents divided into internal and external parts. The details come in the following article.

The aim of this research is analyze the content of Lamerd's lullabies in Fars Province with sociological approach and to illustrate women's situation in family and the function of these lullabies in the mentioned region. The method of this study is qualitative content analysis of lullabies with inductive approach. The results of the research were considered in two sections: 1) the concepts related to family structure and functions of lullabies in relationship between couples.2) Functions of lullabies in relationship between mother and her baby.The findings show the women's situation in traditional and male-dominated society and claim that in such circumstances lullabies had hidden functions for women: 1) they construct protest space for women 2) they prepare conditions for dialogue and explanation of desire and in better words facilitate establishing relationship for women.3) Prepare space to get rid of psychological and structural stress. Therefore Considering the functions of lullabies for women, women's lullabies can be considered as media.

The shift in the axis of development in final decade of 20th century changed its centrality from social sphere to the cultural sphere. Nowadays, cultural development is a precondition to achieve other components of development and those countries that are able to achieve cultural development will be regarded successful at individual and societal levels. The present paper reviews the situation and factors of cultural development among 532 women in Qom province.Results showed that the extent of women's cultural development in Qom province is lower than average and normal. In addition, the most important factors affecting women's cultural development in this province are the following: 1) socio-economic status, 2) Modernism, 3) social capital, 4) pattern variables, and 5) traditional gender beliefs. Results imply that nature of women's cultural development in Qom province is more public rather than medium or elitist.

Professor Jean Yoyotte, one of the most prominent French Egyptologists, holds that perhaps unlike what the Egyptians themselves maintain, the fountainhead of everything is not in Egypt; yet one has to agree that circa 3000 BC, Egypt was indeed much more advanced than its neighboring states. Indelible relics, architectural masterpieces, and works of art remaining from that era have reached us throughout the eons and for this very reason, Egypt is granted a fame and glory beyond its coterminous civilizations (Yoyotte [ii], p, 112).Much has been written on the pharaohs and the rulers and how they governed the land. This paper, however, seeks to investigate into ancient Egypt from a different perspective: the presence of women in the various spiritual and social layers and their rights and advantages which were and still remain to be a rarity in many countries for women. In the Egypt of the pharaohs, women enjoyed the highest peak of spirituality and they could assume the most important positions in the state; some were even pharaohs and would lead the state themselves.

This Study aims to show the changes of the image of women in the novels of Hifa Bitar, in which the author presents the history of women's life in nearly all its stages, adolescence youth and middle age This research throws light on the characteristics, both positive and negative, attributed to women in the following novels: "iomiyat mutalaqa" (1994) [a divorced woman's diary], "qabu-'abasiyeen" (1995) [the abbasid's cellar], "afrah saghira afrah akhira" (1996) [small joys, last joys], "imra ¢ min tabeqein" (1665) [the woman from two floors], and "imra' min hedhihi ai-asr" (20004) [a woman of this age]. We can say that the voice of educated women, who have failed in marriage and present a problem for the men that abuse them, is the central voice dominating the besieged by feelings of failure and frustration, and through their relations with men the example of beaten women and their struggle with the power of time dominant in all the novels under study.