Iranian Women Bloggers Pushing Back the Borders

1
Iranian Women Bloggers Pushing Back the Borders

• Maryam Kiani
• Allameh Tabatabai University
• Tehran, Iran

2
Women in Iran

• The situation of women in Iran and the Muslim
  world is sufficiently complex that it can be
  portrayed in either a positive or negative way.
• the development of high education and women
  interests to enter to the universities has caused
  increasing number of educated Iranian women.

3
Blogging in Iran

• In a short time of blogging in Iran, the number
  of Persian weblogs not only increased remarkably
  but also has gained the rank of 4th among other
  languages blogs in the world.

4
The First Iranian Women Blogger

• The Iranian women blogger archives show that
  Shahrzad Alam-Fathi is the first Iranian woman
  blogger. Since she did not have window 2000 to
  write in Persian, wrote her first entry in
  English in November 6, 2001

5
Types of Blogs

• There are distinguished three basic types of
  weblogs filters, personal journals and k-logs.
  The content of filters is external to the blogger
  (world events, news), while the content of
  personal journal is internal (the bloggers
  thoughts and feelings)

6
Methodology

• The present study is based on the content
  analysis of a random sample of 124 Iranian
  womens blogs collected from January through
  March of 2008.
• Those are collected from two most common free
  Persian blog service providers Blogfa and
  PersianBlog

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Collecting Data

• The personal information of Iranian women
  bloggers.
• The features of the blogs homepages.
• The content of the entries that are the heart of
  the blogs.

8
Results

• the age of half of them (50.8) were coded as
  unknown. About one third of women (35.5) were
  categorized as young who were between 18 to 30
  years old.

9
Results

• The blogs in the sample are overwhelmingly of the
  personal journal type (74.2), that women report
  on their lives, thoughts and feelings.
• Filter blogs account for 11.3 of the sample and
  k-logs are the least frequent at 2.4

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Results

• the content of approximately one third of all
  weblogs were categorized in Literature section.
• Mental issues gained the second rank in this
  figure.
• The other subject was the Social issues which
  included about one fifth of all blogs content.
• Topic related to the Sex and cultural issues had
  the close amount of percentages.

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Results

• All blogs that wrote about the politics had more
  than two year age and none of less-than-one year
  old blog included this category.
• In fact, women who write blog recently, have
  other involvements and writing about serious
  current political affairs is not their priority.

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Results

• Another surprising point is that women who write
  about sexual relations and their bodies have
  created the blogs less than one year.
• Precisely, the age of their bogs was less than
  three months at the time of the analyzing.

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Conclusion

• This research revealed two main conclusions
• the first one is an emerging event to write about
  taboos such as sexual relationships and feminine
  body.
• The other is that more than a half of Iranian
  women bloggers does not think about the
  political, social and cultural affairs of their
  society.

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Conclusion

• There is a new generation of women bloggers who
  pushed the cultural borders in farther distance.
• They experience the possibilities and limitations
  of cyberspace and now write about their bodies
  and sexual desires and actions without any shame.

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Conclusion

• Analyzing the content of their blogs illustrated
  that most of them write poems and prose to show
  their emotions and preferred not to react to the
  political affairs.
• They would like to talk about Self rather than
  Others. They are strongly interested in
  expressing themselves yet not to react to the
  society problems and quest social and political
  desires.

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Conclusion

• Maybe they can change some rules and traditions
  in Iranian society but it seems they are trying
  to push back the borders not by asking about
  political and equal rights but
• by questing equal opportunity in the most private
  sphere.

17
Thank You

• Maryam Kiani
• Allameh Tabatabai University
• Tehran, Iran