NEGOTIATING FEMALE AGENCY, POWER AND RESISTANCE THROUGH WORDS: A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF FACEWORK WITHIN FEMALE CONVERSATIONS IN KAMALI'S THE LION WOMEN OF TEHRAN

Abstract

This study investigates the negotiation of female agency, power, and resistance through conversational interactions in Marjan Kamali’s The Lion Women of Tehran (2024) using Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory. Set within the patriarchal and chaotic sociopolitical context of twentieth-century Iran, the novel depicts women’s struggles for autonomy, identity, and social recognition through interpersonal communication. The paper examines how female characters employ politeness strategies and facework to construct agency, challenge power structures, and maintain mutual social relationships. Adopting a qualitative research design, the study uses purposive textual sampling to select significant female-to-female conversational exchanges that foreground solidarity, resistance, and identity reconciliation. Through pragmatic analysis of dialogues involving Ellie and Homa, the research investigates the use of positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record strategies, and face-threatening acts. The findings indicate that politeness strategies function not only to preserve interpersonal harmony but also as subtle mechanisms of resistance and empowerment. Female characters strategically use facework to negotiate social constraints, express dissent, protect autonomy, and strengthen solidarity within restrictive gendered circumstances. Similarly, conversational interactions emerge as discursive spaces where authority, belonging, and selfhood are continuously negotiated. These findings support the argument that language operates as symbolic power through which women resist dominant ideologies and assert identity (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Mills, 2003). By integrating literary pragmatics with feminist linguistic perspectives, the study contributes to scholarship on gender, discourse, and power in literary texts, highlighting how women’s conversations become key places for the articulation and enactment of agency and resistance in contemporary historical fiction.