GENDER PERFORMANCE BY PAKISTANI EMINENT FEMALE POLITICAL LEADERS IN THEIR MEMOIRES

Abstract

This paper aims to reconstruct how eminent Pakistani female political leaders expressed their gender identities during various phases of their lives on the basis of their memoires written by them. The idea is to figure out how social and political roles motivated them to take on different gender identities. More importantly, the paper attempts at correlating their gender identities in the memoires written by them with their social and political positions they assumed.  In order to see how their identities, oscillate, their lives have been divided into different phases (political and non- political) for characterizing the shift. The paper shows that the gender identities adopted were in commensuration with their political and social roles they wanted to portray, required or expected of them.  The paper, in particular, demonstrates that their gender performance can be best seen as a cline on which their identities fluctuate in consistent with whether they were in the role of a politician or in conventional female capacity. The data was culled from the memoirs written by these female figures who had an eminent political career. The systemic functional grammar presented by Halliday in tandem with Butler’s the theory of gender performance has been used to analyze the memoires under study. The transitivity patterns have been studied in the works and the content analysis has helped in highlighting the manner in which they performed their gender. The data obtained from two sources has been triangulated to buttress the findings. The paper finds that there was no one identity they clung to but they chose to go with the flow in accordance with the demands of their position.