Muslim Feministic Narrative in Poetry: A Literary Analysis of Fahmida Riaz's Poems

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Fahmida Riaz was able to articulate precise feminist politics through her voice because she was audible to many women in the Pakistani context. The current study investigates how her writings about the female body were not merely a tool to celebrate or raise the sexual distance, but also influenced a political intervention and shifted the dominant patriarchal structures present in literary as well as other social and political levels. The purpose of the research is to shed light on how a specific poet's voice was able to reach a large audience of women and articulate explicitly feminist politics in Pakistan.
 
 Methodology: The Feminist Discourse Analysis (FCDA), another dimension of CDA, is employed in the analysis. The application of the FCDA model is adapted to examine how textual representations of gendered practices produce and sustain one gender power and dominance over the other. For the study, an operational method based on four models has been developed: the Fairclough Model, the Porreca Model (Porreca, 1984), Halliday's Transitivity Model (1985), and the FCDA (Lazar, 2005).
 
 Findings: The findings clearly demonstrated how power abuse and gender domination are explicitly present in women's literature. The analysis discusses in detail how gender is constructed in these poems, and how this construction gave women a new perspective on life and defined how they are exploited in the name of social and religious cultures.
 
 Contributions: With the rise of religious extremism in Pakistan, the male-dominated patriarchal narrative is receiving renewed attention. However, based on the findings obtained, greater attention should be paid to the female narrative and the discourse produced by female writers. A similar analysis can be performed on the writings of Kishwar Naheed, another feminist writer, to gain a better understanding of the poetics of Muslim Feminist Narrative.
 
 Keywords: Feminist politics, feminist critical discourse analysis, Porreca Model, Halliday’s transitivity model.
 
 Cite as: Basra, Z., Alvi, U. F., & Nadeem, M. (2022). Muslim feministic narrative in poetry: A literary analysis of Fehmida Riaz’s poems. Journal of Nusantara Studies, 7(2), 424-443. http://dx.doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss2pp424-443