International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

Critical-Metaphorical Analysis of Women's Agency in Sexual Harassment Discourses: The #MeToo Movement in Iran
Hanieh Rezanejad Amirdehy, Forough Esrafilian, and Hayat Ameri

Abstract
Using linguistic methods to assess the women’s discourse is one of the powerful means of demonstrating the diverse identities and perspectives of women across their lifetimes. Metaphor plays a significant role in human communication and its impact is obvious in different discourses. The #MeToo movement on social media provides a dedicated condition for women to voice their experiences of social injustice and sexual harassment. Thus, the current study aims to examine the use of metaphor in the speeches of women who were victims of sexual harassments. Drawing from Jonatan Charteris-Black’s book, ‘Corpus Approaches To Critical Metaphor Analysis’, our approach involves analysis of conceptual metaphor and keys. The main data consists of 20 interviews with women who have suffered sexual violence from men, shared on the official #MeToo movement Instagram account in Iran. From these findings, it can be concluded that frequency of the patient conceptual keys is higher than that of agent ones. Surprisingly, these findings reveal the agency of Iranian women during sexual harassment is in the lowest stage.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijgws.v12a3