Voicing the Silenced: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Gender and Power in the Dialogueof Pakistani Drama Serial Udaari

Abstract

Television dramas are ideologically potent locations of production. In Pakistan, drama serials reflect and uphold strong social concepts regarding gender and power. Udaari (2016) is a groundbreaking serial that touches upon the controversial topic of child sexual abuse and includes several female characters who must deal with highly unequal social conditions. Nevertheless, the dialogues of Udaari have not been discussed as a field of the construction of gender and power using language, despite its cultural importance. The study addresses this gap by using the three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis formulated by Norman Fairclough on the conversations held in the first ten episodes of the serial. At the textual level, the paper will focus on the linguistic elements such as modality, grammatical transitivity, forms of address, and conversational patterns to demonstrate how power is coded within the daily speech of characters. On the discursive practice level, the paper examines the subjective placement of both female characters as the agents or victims of power, which the serial narration and its representational strategies accomplish. On the level of social practice, the findings are related to larger forms of patriarchy, inequality of classes, and media discourse within Pakistani society. As the analysis shows, the language of Udaari works at two levels at the same time. It recreates patriarchal ideology using the naturalized, commanding rhetoric of its male antagonist. Also, it attacks ideology by providing female characters with instances of the veritable speech of linguistic resistance, and by making visible the processes of silence and manipulation, on which the ideology of abuse relies. This paper presents the argument that Udaari is not a storytelling device only. It is a place where gender relations are actively produced, fought, and at crucial times, changed