زهراسادات رضوی علوی

  Abstract What is the experience of being a woman? How does the world and femininity manifest to a woman? How do women, in the context of multiple roles, different bodies, and societal norms and values, make sense of femininity? The experience of being a woman with different lifeworlds and the connection between lifeworlds shapes the meaning of femininity. Although this meaning seems very obvious and self-evident, both sexes reflected on the interview questions and the conversation and language of this world revealed to them. The construction of a feminine world and gender stereotypes either forced women to go along with such a world or forced them to censor the reality of their lives. The third way is to confront stereotypes. She seeks to create a new world in which neither traditional stereotypes are imposed on her nor does the modern world impose its own on her. A woman’s understanding of femininity is far more complex than a man’s understanding of this concept. Women creatively turn to words and transform the world they have experienced into a world full of concepts with the help of words. But men have specific categories that are less experienced and, despite understanding it from a distance, they speak decisively about it. Meanwhile, women, through their experience of femininity, are constantly rethinking and uncertain about the concept of femininity. Addressing issues such as women in the home and family, in the field of politics, in the field of economics, the social construction of femininity and traditional and modern women, the image of a good-successful woman, the image of a powerful woman, physicality and the effects of menstruation, sexual relations, etc. on the perception of femininity has been studied in this research. The method we have chosen in this study is the phenomenological method, and its choice was also necessary because our basic intention was to discard stereotypes and, in the phenomenological sense of the word, to apothesize the dominant approaches around the issue of femininity, in order to approach the lived experience of femininity and enable its disclosure. The interviewees were selected using the convenience sampling method in this study, and the MAXQDA coding program was used to organize the data. The coding began with the raw interview texts, and this circular process continued through several stages until theoretical saturation. The ideas of thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Berger, and Luckmann were used to conceptualize the research results. Keywords: Woman, femininity, man, phenomenology, experience, lifeworld, consciousness, time, place, body, other, social reality