SPEAKING BETWEEN THE LINES: GENDERED TRANSLANGUAGING AND THE NEGOTIATION OF AUTHORITY, SOLIDARITY, AND RESISTANCE AMONG PAKISTANI WOMEN ON INSTAGRAM

Abstract

This study investigates the gendered translanguaging practices in the comment section of Instagram videos of Pakistani women digital creators, focusing on the ways women use multilingual semiotic resources to assert feminist authority, to show solidarity, and to articulate resistance to the patriarchal norms. Based on the translanguaging theory of Garcia and Li Wei, 2014, gender performativity (Butler, 1990) and feminist stylistics (Mills, 1995), the study has analysed a corpus of 71 authentic comments by five verified women creatives in Pakistan across five content genres: Fashion and lifestyle, social issues, Comedy and social commentary, Women's empowerment, and Islamic psychology and professional discourse. The study finds eight gendered translanguaging functions (GTFs) that operate in the corpus through a three-level coding scheme identifying varieties of language, GTF and discursive positioning. The predominant functions are critical social commentary (43.7%), female solidarity marking (38.0%) and feminist authority performance (32.4%). The religious-feminist hybrid pattern (GTF-2) is a theoretically important finding wherein two types of frames, both Arabic Islamic and feminist, intermingle with each other, and a distinctly Pakistani pattern of digital feminist discourse is created where women's resistance is rooted in Islamic values. The results expand the theory of translanguaging to gendered digital discourse in South Asian contexts for implications to sociolinguistics, feminist linguistics and language education.