MATRIARCHY IN SERVICE OF PATRIARCHY: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF POWER, CLASS, AND GENDER IDEOLOGY IN THE PAKISTANI DRAMA SERIAL NOOR JAHAN

Abstract

The Pakistani television dramas are strong cultural discourses through which the ideologies of gender, class and power are actively built and reproduced in the language. The Pakistani drama serial Noor Jahan is used as a text to explore the issues of power, class and patriarchal ideology in the analysis of its female characters in this study using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by the three-dimensional model of Norman Fairclough (1992, 1995). Three central aspects of the study are explored: the diverging linguistic approaches of the two most prominent female characters, the social class of subordinate female characters and their linguistic space and voice, and the construction of son-preference ideology in the dominant female discourse. 12 scenes were selected from the 33 episodes of the drama, where the female characters interacted or negotiated their power directly. The data were analyzed at three levels: textual, discursive and social practice at Fairclough's. The results show that the dominant female characters use imperatives, possessive pronouns and declarative speech acts to assert themselves, and subordinate female characters are linguistically marginalized through the use of hedging, silence and the lack of dialogue. Voice and linguistic space in the drama is directly related to social class. Additionally, the study reveals that the central character, Noor Jahan, while being a matriarch, is also very active in the propagation of patriarchal ideology in her discourse on sons, thus revealing that not only men but also women who are ideologically conditioned by patriarchal systems are active in the propagation of these systems.