Representation of Women as Social Activists in the Field of Family Relations: Discourse Analysis of the Novels "I Turn Off the Lights" and "We Get Used to It" by Zoya Pirzad

Subject Areas : Iranian Sociological Review

Mohammadreza Hesaraki ^{1 *}

1 - Assistant Professor, Department of Persian Language and Literature, ShQ.C., Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran

Received: 2025-03-28 Accepted : 2025-10-20 Published : 2025-06-14

Keywords: Sociology of Literature, Women's Activism, Zoya Pirzad, Pierre Bourdieu's Field Theory, Symbolic Capital,

Abstract :

This study aims to explore the mechanisms of women's activism in the private sphere of the family, analyzing two of Zoya Pirzad's landmark novels, titled "I Turn Off the Lights" (Pirzad, 2001) and "We Get Accustomed" (Pirzad, 2005). Relying on the framework of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field and types of capital (Bourdieu, 2003; Bourdieu, 2012), as the central theoretical framework, it is argued that the central female characters in these works are not passive beings, but rather intelligent actors who compete and resist in the family sphere - as an arena of power relations - to acquire symbolic capital and redefine their identity. Using the method of discourse analysis and focusing on literary texts as data, this study shows how these characters use cultural capital (such as education and literary taste) as well as strategies such as “silent resistance” and “redefinition of emotion” as levers to increase their individual agency and create changes in the rules governing the field. The findings of this research indicate that the discourse formed in Pirzad’s novels reflects the transition of Iranian women from the status of social “object” to “subject” with will and depicts the possibility of resistance within traditional structures through everyday and seemingly mundane actions. This analysis ultimately reveals the deep connection between the sociology of literature and cultural studies in the rereading of contemporary Iranian fictional texts (Torkeman and Mehrabi, 2016).

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