Politics of Patriarchy: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Male Authority and Female Resistance in Shah’s Dystopian Novel Before She Sleeps

Abstract

Patriarchy as a discursive and institutional structure is the root cause of systematic marginalization and mistreatment of women in all aspects of life. This paper provides a feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps, exploring how the construction, legitimation, and maintenance of male authority are linguistically enabled, and how female resistance is a counter-discursive practice. The novel presents a dystopian society in which totalitarianism is exercised by legal, religious, and moral discourses that enforce strict gender hierarchies, thus making it normal to conduct surveillance, regulation, and commodification of the female bodies. The protagonist’s acts of defiance as forms of discursive resistance are a means to disrupt the dominant patriarchal discourses. Through questioning the discursive site of power, control, and gendered subjugation, this paper shows how the ideology of patriarchy is exercised through the language to naturalize inequality and limit female agency. The findings of the study show that Before She Sleeps does not only reveal the processes of patriarchal domination, but also expresses a counter-hegemonic vision of female empowerment and transformative agency, which is possible through resistance within the discourse.