Iranian Women’s Negative Face in the Construction of Their Identity

A main feature of recent scholarly work on language is its focus on identity, or the self, as a social construct, or more particularly as a discursive product (Fairclough, ۱۹۹۲; Ivanic, ۱۹۹۸). One way of viewing the self as a social construct is through the notion ‘face’, i.e. “the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself (sic) by the line others assume he (sic) has taken during a particular contact” (Goffman, ۱۹۶۷: ۵). Building upon Goffman’s notion of ‘face’ as asocial construct and the Brown and Levinson’s (۱۹۸۷) politeness theory and particularly their claim touniversality of ‘face’, the present study is an endeavour to investigate the ways in which Iranianwomen’s identity, or ‘face’ wants, affect their linguistic interaction with the members of the oppositesex. This study was conducted in a case study format and the data thus obtained were analysed using QSR.NUDIST software. The subjects were seven women working at Iranian governmental offices whose daily interactions with their male and female customers were observed over a two week period. Eleven follow up interviews were conducted with the participants. The results indicate that Iranian women show a systematic awareness of the significance of their face wants in constructing their identity as ‘Iranian women’. Nevertheless, this negative face is not entirely socially motivated and is not likely to be explicable in accord with Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory which is often postulated to be universal.

Keywords:

politeness theory , language and identity , social construction of identity