Strategies of Meaning Continuity in Female Heroism in the Shāhnāmeh: A Tensive Semiotic [L4.1]Analysis of Sindokht and Gordāfarid

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach grounded in tensive semiotics, this study investigates the strategies for the continuity of meaning regarding female heroism in Iranian mythology. In the majority of mythological studies, female heroism is predominantly defined within the framework of gender stereotypes and corporeal action on the battlefield, with limited attention devoted to the mechanisms of sustaining and reproducing this meaning within psychological and discursive domains. Based on the analytical framework of this inquiry, the “continuity of heroic meaning” is defined as the process of preserving and reproducing heroic agency by shifting the locus of action from physical and corporeal conflict to the sphere of psychological management and discursive politics. The significance and novelty of this research lie in transcending the reduction of epic women’s roles to marginal and stereotypical functions, and proposing an analytical model for the simultaneous examination of two complementary paradigms of female heroism. Accordingly, Gordafarid and Sindokht, two prominent characters in the Shahnameh, are examined as archetypes of corporeal and discursive heroism, respectively. The research employs a qualitative, descriptive-analytical methodology, extracting data through the semio-semantic analysis of narrative situations alongside corporeal and psychological descriptions. The findings reveal that female heroism in the Shahnameh is sustained through a transition from the physical battlefield to diplomacy and discursive politics. This reading demonstrates that mythical women functioned as dynamic and efficacious agents in managing, intensifying, or resolving the fundamental tensions of the epic