The Representation of Women and Musical Instruments in the Qajar Period Based on Feminist Reading; The Case Study of Three Works by Abu al-Qasim

Delfani Baluch, Fateme; Saraji, Sepehr; Heydari, Seyed Mohammad Amin

doi:10.22051/pgr.2023.41765.1185

The Representation of Women and Musical Instruments in the Qajar Period Based on Feminist Reading; The Case Study of Three Works by Abu al-Qasim

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ PhD. Student, Department of Art Research, Faculty of Theories and Art Studies, Tehran University of Art, Tehran, Iran, Corresponding Author.

² PhD., Department of Art Research, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

³ PhD. Student, Department of Art Research, Faculty of Theories and Art Studies, Tehran University of Art, Tehran, Iran.

10.22051/pgr.2023.41765.1185

Abstract

The Representation of Women and Musical Instruments in the Qajar Period Based on Feminist Reading; The Case Study of Three Works by Abu al-Qasim
This research is based on feminist criticism of the representation of women along with musical instruments in three works by Abu al-Qasim, the painter. He was an Iranian painter in the Qajar period and one of the leaders of the style of court portraiture, who mostly depicted women the musician and dancer of the court of Fath Ali Shah Qajar. The reason for choosing the feminism approach is to study and analyse how women discriminated in the text of the work and in general at the level of societies. In this approach feminist criticism is a suitable method for gender-oriented studies and especially for investigating the position of women in the works of art. Here the aim of writers is to discover gender meanings hidden in paintings in order to reflect on the position of women in these works and how they are reflected in the paintings. Because, most of the patrons and painters of these paintings were men, musician women has been studied as the subject of the work and the female musician as the artist within the text of the paintings. The main research question about the position of women and how the painter or the audience of the paintings deals with them as the subject of the paintings is stated as follows: What is the role and function of the women who are represented in these examples? Are these women depicted and known as artists and musicians? If so, why there is no name and address of them as artists available? In contrast to if this is not the case, how can you come to a conclusion by studying the paintings, what exactly is the position and role of women in these works? It should be accepted that whatever this possible role is, it is not a representative image of a female as an artist-musician. In order to prove such an idea, the authors have used written sources (historical approach) in addition to reading the images to compensate the information shortcomings . The sources inform about the condition and position (chronological era) of female as musicians at the time of the creation of the paintings, which is Qajar period. Among these sources Sasan Fatemi's detailed studies on Qajar music, including the format of the book “Celebration and Music in Iranian Urban Cultures” (Fatemi, 2013), the study of the status of women in this period by Afsaneh Najmabadi in the form of the book “Mustached Women and Beardless Men” (Najmabadi, 2016) and also an article in The context of women depicted in Qajar paintings with the title of “representation of female musicians in the Qajar painting” (Sadat Kashani, Rahbar and Rizvani, 1400). In the meantime the mentioned works have more authority and proximity to the subject of the present research. The collection of these sources and works shows the mostly inferior position of the female gender in various social and cultural affairs. The conditions in the flow of Qajar art and music are still dominant, except for exceptional cases. Based on this information together and also the icons of the works, such a hypothesis has been formed that women in this paintings Rather than being a representative image of

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References

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URLs

Url1: https://iranantiq.com/handicraft/traditional-instruments/kamancheh , 2022- 10-20.

Url 2: https://digitalcommons.morris.umn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi , 2022-10-28.

Url13: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/221661612896481408/ ,2022-10-22.