Asghar Farhadi’s nuanced feminism: Gender and marriage in Farhadi’s films from Dancing in the Dust to A Separation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aiming to contribute towards studies of gender in Iranian cinema, this article draws on feminist and masculinities theories to examine representations of gender in the films of Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, including his first Academy Awardwinning film, A Separation. While most literature on gender in Iranian cinema equates gender with femininity and women, I show that foregrounding men and masculinities in the analysis of Farhadi’s films enhances our understanding of his films’ feminist concerns and of the underlying structures of gender in current Iranian society, as represented in these films. Furthermore, I argue that theories of masculinity can help in expanding the corpus of Iranian feminist cinematography. In current accounts of Iranian feminist cinema, scholars refer to well-known sets of films that mostly feature female leads; however, reading Farhadi’s movies in light of masculinities theories shows that even though the films focus on both men and women, a nuanced feminism has been ever present in his works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".