Comparative Critical Gender Analysis in Iranian News Papers between Persian and English Art and Culture Sections

There is a type of discourse analytical research that dealing with the way social power misuse, dominance and imbalancement are approved, replicated and resisted via text and talk in the political and social context, this kind of research is called Critical Discourse Analysis. Analysts in the field of critical discourse aim to understand, expose and ultimately to resist social imbalancement. This study investigated gender representation in political sections of two Persian newspapers (Jame Jam and Hamshahri) and two English newspapers (Tehran Times and Iran Daily). To attain the purpose of the study, 20 articles (10 Persian and 10 English articles) were selected from the newspapers to be investigated Fairclough's (2001) three-dimensional model was selected and adopted as the model of study.Five factors were selected and art and culture sections of the newspapers were investigated using these factors, (i.e. characters of male and female), social roles of them, titles of male and female, order of appearance, and finally the pictorial representation of both genders. The results demonstrated that there are not any significant differences in gender representation in Persian and English newspapers. The findings also demonstrated that regarding all of these factors, males dominated females. In other words, the number and percent of males′ representation were more than females′.