Poststructural Representation of the Concept of Childhood in Child and Adolescent Programs of the Islamic Republic of Iran Television in the 2000s

This article has been carried out to explore the concept of childhood through one of the most symbolic cultural tools i.e. children television programs in a period of Iranian political and social history that is more than anything in the control of conflicting signifiers such as conflict in politics and identities which occur in the new lifestyle of the social arena. Shantal Mouffe attempts to discover the agonistic domains of irreconcilable distinctions between our and/or their collective identities with the help of the empirical theoretical framework using a network of meaningful intertextual relationships. Press semiotics has been used to discover hegemonic (though incomplete and vulnerable) forms of identity in children. The question of how children are represented in Iranian television production programs and how they represent them in relation to the ruling power is the question of the present article. Investigating the semantic conflict of the 1980s led to the representation of two different ‘others ‘, one critical in the absent signs of the new style of life and the other in the representation of our identities. The hegemonic discourse of the 1980s was considered as the decisive point of textual analysis. The findings indicate the representation of children as a political subject and the potential position of resistance to compromise with superior power that explains the child’s relationship with political power within self-critical discourse.