Gender Construction, Discrimination, and Identity: Critical Discourse Analysis of The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

Abstract

This study is an effort to create awareness related to gender construction, discrimination, and identity in literary discourse structures. Gender is usually built and enacted through implicit ideological propositions to sustain and maintain existing social structures by using language. The study attempts to examine and analyze Nadia Hashmi’s The Pearl That Broke Its Shell from the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis. It is an analytical exploration to investigate ideologically constructed gender identity and gender discrimination through linguistic structures in the discourses of the selected novel. To analyze extracts from the selected novels, the researcher has applied Norman Fairclough’s Tri-dimensional approach to CDA. This approach analyses the text from three dimensions, textual analysis, process analysis, and social analysis. Hashmi’s novels revealed the socially and culturally moulded discourse structures in the novels. The discourse structures of novels are deeply rooted in Afghan social structures to sustain power relations and social order. It was explored that language is used to control, dominate, and suppress the less powerful and weak groups of society. The existing patriarchal structures were implied in the discourse structures, which are the product of social and cultural norms.