The Transformation of the Female Voice in Contemporary Persian Poetry: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Gender Discourse after the Constitutional Revolution

Abstract

The transformation of the female voice in contemporary Persian poetry represents one of the most significant manifestations of literary, social, and gender-related change after the Constitutional Revolution. This study examines how women gradually moved from being objects of representation to becoming speaking subjects endowed with agency in contemporary Persian poetry. The research adopts a mixed corpus-based and discourse-analytical approach and investigates a selected body of poems by women poets from different post-Constitutional periods in terms of lexical patterns, pronouns, verbs, collocations, and semantic fields. Particular attention is paid to concepts such as the body, love, home, family, motherhood, freedom, movement, silence, speech, and resistance. The findings indicate that the female voice has progressively shifted from a position largely defined by emotional and familial roles toward a more self-aware, interpretive, and agentive subject position. The increasing centrality of the first-person pronoun, the growing use of verbs associated with choice and action, the reconfiguration of the relationship between “I” and “you,” the transformation of the body from an object of observation into a site of lived experience, and the broader participation of female speakers in social and public discourse constitute major indicators of this change. Concepts such as love, motherhood, and home have not disappeared; rather, they have been redefined from the perspective of women’s lived experience. The results further suggest that the maturation of the female voice lies not in the emergence of a single homogeneous feminine language, but in the increasing plurality of speaking positions, experiences, and modes of self-definition. The corpus-based approach provides a systematic means of tracing these historical patterns and, when combined with discourse analysis, offers a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship among language, gender, and subjectivity in contemporary Persian poetry.