MOTHERNESS AS OTHERNESS: A FEMINIST CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF MATERNAL REPRESENTATION IN PAKISTANI TELEVISION DRAMAS
Keywords:
Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis, Motherness, Otherness, Pakistani Television DramasAbstract
This study analyses the representation of motherness in Pakistani television dramas as othering process with a corpus-assisted feminist critical discourse analysis of 15 IMDB-rated Pakistani television dramas aired between 2018 and 2024. Inspired by the ideology of de Beauvoir (1953) which advocates that idealisation of women turns them into the Other, the analysis examines collocational and discursive patterns surrounding the node mother and its variants. The results indicate that the same linguistic features to define motherness also produce different kinds of maternal otherness. Helpless motherness generates powerless otherness, since mothers are discussed in terms of loss, shame, and burden of emotions. Idealised motherness brings about symbolic otherness wherein individuality is erased by intuition, unconditional care and moral constancy. Mythic otherness is created by superhuman motherness because the exaggerated power and cosmic metaphor place the mother at a higher level while limiting her humanity. In all these constructions mothers are still emotionally central and structurally marginal, glorified but deprived. The study concludes that dramas in Pakistan support a culturally hegemonic model of motherness as otherness in which reverence serves as a complement to discursive constraint.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Afzala Yaseen, Dr. Rashid Mahmood (Author)
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