Generalisation of Patriarchy in Pakistan: Analysing Negation Concerning Women in Ziauddin Yousafzai’s Let Her Fly

Abstract

Negation is a linguistic tool used to express denial, contradiction, non-existence, or falsification of a proposition or a sentence. This paper highlights the use of negation as a strategy to misrepresent Pakistani society as highly patriarchal. Patriarchy exists in every culture, but its intensity varies in different cultures.  The present study examines how Ziauddin Yousafzai and Louise Carpenter employ negation to illustrate the concept of patriarchy in Pakistan.  However, this view cannot be extended to the whole country. Gerda Hedwig Lerner and Sylvia Walby’s theory of patriarchy supports the argument of the  paper. Gunnel Tottie’s model for the identification of negation words and negative propositions has been used to analyse textual references. The model is  used to highlight negation on a syntactic level that gives a compound effect in the propositions, thereby generalising patriarchy in Pakistani society. The  memoir serves as a window that lets the reader look into Ziauddin Yousafzai’s social life in Swat, Pakistan. The study of negation in the paper is significant as  it attempts to highlight the misrepresentation of Pakistani society as being patriarchal. The strategic use of recurrent negation words concerning women  seems to add the writers’ narrative to the list of ones who talk about gender inequalities in the East with aims to gain Western readership and praise. The  research concludes that non-affixal negation (both in no-negation and not-negation types) has been generously used concerning women to misrepresent  Pakistan to Western readers by focusing only on a smaller group and generalising it all over Pakistan.

Key Words: Negation, patriarchy, Pakistani society, women, generalisation