Power and Gender Issues in Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This critical discourse study explores power and gender issues discursively constructed in Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride. The study aims to examine gender issues in the tribal patriarchal social system in Pakistan. The novel understudy critically explored the abuse of power in a patriarchal society. Lazar’s concept of Feminist critical discourse analysis and Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis has been chosen to examine the main issues faced by women in remote areas of Pakistan. Fairclough’s (1989) model has been adopted as a method for the analysis of the selected excerpts taken from the text of the novel. The analysis of the text has been made on the ground to explore women's marginalization, patriarchal hegemony, and power exercise in Pakistan’s remote areas.