GENDER PERFORMANCE BY PAKISTANI EMINENT FEMALE POLITICALLEADERS IN THEIR MEMOIRS

Abstract

This study aims to reconstruct how eminent Pakistani female political leaders enacted their gender identities during
various phases of their lives based on their memoirs. The idea is to figure out how social and political roles
motivated them to take on different gender identities. Essentially, the study attempts at correlating their gender
identities in their memoirs with the social and political positions they assumed. For characterizing the shift and to
see how their identities oscillate, their lives have been divided into different phases, that is political and nonpolitical. The data were gathered from the memoirs written by the female figures who had eminent political careers.
The systemic functional grammar presented by Halliday in tandem with Butler’s theory of gender performance has
been used to analyze the memoirs. The transitivity patterns have been studied in the works and the content analysis
has helped in highlighting how they performed their gender. The data obtained from two sources have been
triangulated to reinforce the findings. The results show that the gender identities that the female political leaders
adopted were in commensuration with the political and social roles they wanted to portray, required, or expected of
them. The findings, in particular, demonstrate that their gender performance can be best seen as a cline on which
their identities fluctuate inconsistently with whether they were in the role of a politician or conventional female
capacity. They did not cling to any fixed identity rather they chose to go with the flow under the demands of their
position.