Projecting Patriarchal Social Order In Pakistani Drama ‘Sang-e-Mah' On Television: A Socio-Cultural Study

Abstract

The present study showcases to study the portrayal of female characters in Pakistani TV drama ‘Sang-e-Mah’ and in doing so the special focus of the research was to analyze how discourse contributes to form social identities and that how linguistic choices made by different female characters project their image. Discourse and identity is widely studied under critical discourse analysis and the present dissertation is a contribution to analyze the notion of identity in the electronic media especially in reference to TV serials. ‘Sang-e-Mah’ tends to portray Pashtun culture circulating around the concept of ‘Ghag’. The current research employs a coherent and comprehensive Fairclough’s 3D model (1992) under the philosophical assumptions of cultural critical discourse analysis (Gavriely-Nuri, 2012). The data comprises dialogues from different episodes that reflect gender. The primary concern of the present research is to highlight how female characters are portrayed in drama. The study reveals that female characters pass through many phases of pain and sorrow and their representation is related to those patriarchal values and traditions. In addition, the linguistic choices made by the speaker like tone, intonation, relational modality, tense and aspect, syntactic construction, ideologically and attitudinally loaded expression and nominalizations all contribute to answer the research questions that these cultural values are produced, maintained, distributed, contested, circulated and consumed regularly and consistently in the discourse on gender and identity.

Keywords: Discourse, culture, gender, identity, ideology and power.