Syntax and Silence: The Gendered Grammar of Power in Pakistan
In Pakistan, women do not simply participate in politics—they are constructed through it, often framed not as actors but as symbols. Political discourse routinely transforms gender into metaphor: women are "mothers of the nation," "daughters of the soil," or "victims of tragedy." These labels carry emotive resonance, but they also restrict women to narrow moral scripts that reduce their presence to sacrificial icons, rather than political agents.
From a linguistic standpoint, women are frequently introduced via syntactic subordination—as wives, daughters, or beneficiaries of male legacies—erasing individual political identity and reinforcing patriarchal hierarchy. Even prominent female politicians are seldom addressed without reference to their male relatives, suggesting that their political legitimacy is derivative rather than autonomous.
Discourse analysis reveals a second pattern: semantic containment through emotional language. Women are mentioned most often in the context of violence, morality, or shame, not policy or leadership. Terms like "tears," "honor," and "silence" dominate the lexical field, framing women as vessels of national conscience, rather than strategic contributors to its future.
Moreover, the erasure is institutionalized through collective nouns. Terms such as "voters," "shehri," "log" or "taxpayers" are treated grammatically as masculine, implicitly excluding women. This is not a mere oversight of language but a reflection of deeper socio-political assumptions about who constitutes the polity.
A final layer of gendered discourse emerges through code-switching. Politicians frequently invoke traditional femininity in Urdu—drawing on metaphors of "izzat" and "ghar"—while adopting impersonal bureaucratic tones in English, effectively bifurcating political subjectivity by language and gender.
To deconstruct gender bias in Pakistan’s politics, it is not enough to include more women in power. We must interrogate the very linguistic structures that define what political presence looks like—and who is granted it.
