Visual gender ideology in the works of male and female painters in the last six decades in Iran

Representing women both in portraitures and figurative works has been very frequent and repetitive in the art works of female and male artists in Iran's contemporary art as well as Iranian traditional painting in previous eras. Comparing the works of male and female artists representing women in their paintings and considering these works through the passage of time in the contemporary history of Iranian painting, the authors of this article have divided Iranian contemporary painting into three separate periods which can help us reach considerable points regarding the hidden gender ideology underlying their creation and in the minds of their creators. This research, with pulling together the two concepts of "visual ideology" and "gender ideology" and deriving the newly-coined concept of "visual gender ideology" as a combination of the two prior concepts, and then applying it in analyzing the works of male and female painters representing women as their artistic subject in these three periods by using the visual social semiotics methodology in analyzing the visual codes within a feminist approach, aims to clarify the sexist visual ideology of male artists when they come to represent women in their art works on the one hand, and have investigated the evolution of such visual gender ideology in the works of male and female painters through these three separate periods on the other hand. It also reveals the contrasting approaches female and male painters have and use when they come to represent women in their art works, which could be itself a clear evidence of their ideology regarding the issue of women. Most often, male painters objectify women’s picture in a way that it is drawn very close to their phantasies regarding the feminine identity and their sexist gender ideology. By doing so, they used to and are -consciously or not- reproducing that traditional view of women as a pleasing and possible to the dominant male gaze, as an object of desire. This continuing trend of reproducing such a fake picture of women’s identity and gender by representing them as such by male artists have and would construct a false identity of women and femininity in our traditional and contemporary visual culture reflecting the sexist gender ideology underlying it. With having this in mind, it could be said that representation can be used as a strong tool to construct and reproduce a false picture of women and femininity in a countries visual culture reflecting its false understanding or better to say ideology regarding the issue of gender. It is concluded that the sexist approach of male artists in representing women in their art works has been moderated as we move from the early modern painting in Iran and come closer to the present decade. In the most recent period, which is regarded as Iran's today painting, we can find more "realistic" women in the works of the young generation of male painters as compared to their counterparts in the two previous periods.