Open AccessFemale Identity De-Struction in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s About a Burning Girl
Author(s) -
Amna Saeed,
Syed Sheraz Anjum
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
pakistan journal of women's studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2708-8065
pISSN - 1024-1256
DOI - 10.46521/pjws.026.01.0020
Subject(s) - ideology , girl , identity (music) , narrative , sociology , gender studies , power (physics) , marxist philosophy , anecdote , perspective (graphical) , aesthetics , literature , psychology , politics , art , developmental psychology , physics , quantum mechanics , political science , law , visual arts
Language as a form of social practice is an essential tool to wield power and dominate the weak. What appears to be a simple narration of an anecdote may be a perpetuation of certain perspectives and a disguised manipulation of the reader. About a Burning Girl by Daniyal Mueenuddin is a text which depicts a married Pakistani woman of lower social strata struggling not just for her acceptance but also for her life. Socially as well as economically subjugated, she is a convenient scapegoat and the softest of the targets in a male dominated patriarchal society. To highlight the destruction/de-structuring of female identity through language in the text, in relation to Hodge and Kress’s (1993) analytical model, this study aims to analyze the selected text from the Marxist feminist perspective, which sees women as the exploited working class. Analysis of the representative syntagms in the selected text shows that the female subject, as perceived by the male author, is represented as a de-structured, voiceless, dead character. The study thus exposes the underlying ideology of the text and its social implication as discourse with respect to women being represented as weak, speechless objects of male manipulation in Pakistani literature.