Gender Representation in Literary Text: A Study of Linguistic Sexism in Ali’s The Stone Woman

Abstract

This study aims to explore the use of language at word level to determine the types of sexist language used in a literary text. For the purpose, Tariq Ali’s (2000) novel The Stone Woman (TSW) is selected as it contains several female and male characters, and it is expected that the writer has represented both these genders differently through the use of different linguistic choices. Linguistic items from TSW have been collected through purposive sampling technique using close reading method and AntConc (3.2.1) software. Similarly, the study findings have been presented in the form of tables and interpreted accordingly. It has been found that the unequal treatment of the representation of gender through linguistic choices does exist to marginalize women. The study findings also assert that gender discrimination is carried out through linguistic sexism and that the feminist stylistic model is suitable to analyze such a sexist attitude of the writers. The use of such language which represents women negatively shows a biased attitude of the writer towards gender depiction.