Voices of Gender Discrimination: A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Khaled Husseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to investigate feminist stylistic analysis about various voices of gender discrimination in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns 2007. It unveils the female characters’ attempts of resistance to such discriminatory practices and their underlying ideologies. The novel is a chronological narration of the Afghan people beset by their domestic and socio-political issues. However, gender discrimination (or sexism) against the Afghan women at the domestic, social and institutional levels is a dominant thematic issue. The major characters in the novel provide a strong base for various causes of the issue, and their subsequent implications of gender discrimination in different ethnic, ideological and institutional backgrounds. The study highlights not only the linguistic resources, but also the social and institutional underpinnings of gender discrimination. It reveals that the linguistic resources for gender discrimination include attributive, dehumanizing, belittling, oppressing and sexist terms and expressions.