WOMEN REPRESENTATION IN POST-COLONIAL FICTION: A CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE SELECTED WORD ‘BIBI’

Abstract

Pakistani English fiction provides a window to the social representation of women. Exploring narratives with corpus-assisted discourse analysis has changed the landscape of linguistic analysis and it provides sufficient evidence in the form of fiction corpus. The aim of this study is to explore gender stereotype construction in post-colonial fiction. It applied a corpus-assisted approach to the selected corpus (PakLocCorpus). This article explored the multifaceted and pluralistic representation of the Pakistani woman, ranging from different accounts of native female sensuality and discussion of social reform issues to admiring inscriptions of wifely devotion or the lady from the household, ‘Bibi’. A corpus of Pakistani English Fiction, that is part of an extended project, PakLocCorpus, is exploited for the current analysis. Corpus Assisted Discourse analysis of themes has been carried out to identify gender stereotypes through colloquial patterns of the selected word ‘Bibi’ in Pakistani society. All collocates of selected words are analyzed for the discourse analysis of themes.  The results revealed that the local narrative representation of women denotes a respectful figure and this social illustration is different than the one presented in Western media. On the contrary, modern writers raise their voices to highlight the construction of gender stereotypes in society. The study is a significant contribution to the existing literature.