Subverting Patriarchy through Écriture Feminine in Fawzia Afzal-Khan’s Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style

Abstract

This research paper explores linguistic techniques employed by Fawzia Afzal-Khan in her memoir Lahore with Love: Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani Style (LWL) to challenge patriarchal norms and structures. The theoretical frameworks used for this research are drawn from structural linguistics including the works of Mills (1995), Spender (1980), as well as French Poststructuralists: Cixous (1975) and Irigaray (1985). Through analysis of the linguistic features of her narrative such as tropes, metaphors, imagery, wordplay, polyphony, genre-mixing, and code-mixing, the paper strives to illustrate the alternative writing style of the memoirist.  The objective is to reveal that her linguistic and stylistic methods differ from the dominant structural and patriarchal writing styles, and mark her feminine individuality expressed thematically and stylistically in her memoir. The significance of our approach is that our analysis of her narrative is informed by a combination of the literary insights of the French feminists along with the ideas gained from the discipline of feminist linguistics and feminist stylistics. We hope that this paper goes some way in filling the research gap in the domain of Pakistani women’s memoir-writing: an emerging arena of literary studies which is ignored and dismissed both in its literary merit and political significance.