Empowering Women by sharing life struggles: A critical Discourse Analysis of Muniba Mazari’s inspirational speech.

Abstract

Background: The study presents the critical discourse analysis of Muniba Mazari speech (confined to one speech about her life struggles in her own words in TEDx) to unveil the concept of empowering women by sharing life struggles in Pakistani socio-cultural context. Muniba Mazari is UN representative of women of Pakistan and considered as the ‘iron lady of Pakistan’ that is why in this research her one speech at TEDx Malaysia in 2017,which went viral on social media. Her life story and struggle in the form of speech is analyzed by using Textual dimension of Three dimensional model of Fairclough (1989) approach to critical discourse analysis which is integrated with M.A.K. Halliday’s (1985) Systematic Functional Grammar (SFG).

Methodology: This qualitative study analyzed linguistic elements used by Muniba Mazari in her speech while sharing her life struggles in order to unveil the concept of women empowerment.

Results: The finding include the excessive use of Pronoun ‘I’ which shows the explicit power as a woman. By using words with negative connotation like ‘disable’ she gave new direction to look at these words which have negative connation. Moreover, the key findings include how she was trapped in her societal customs and at last after her tragedy she took step for herself.

Conclusion: This study will play an important role in the emerging trend of women empowerment in Pakistan by analyzing the language of an iron lady of Pakistan.