Discursive Constructions of Female Selfhood, Agency, and Resistance in Noor Unnahar’s yesterday i was the moon: A Feminist Critical Discourse-Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This study examines the discursive construction of female selfhood, agency, and resistance in selected poems from Noor Unnahar’s yesterday i was the moon. Although research on South Asian women’s Anglophone poetry has often foregrounded thematic concerns such as gender, identity, diaspora, sexuality, resistance, and postcolonial experience, as well as biographical and feminist interpretations (Innes, 2017; King, 2001; Kumari, 2025; Prasad, 2012; Rao, 2016), comparatively limited attention has been devoted to the systematic examination of how micro-linguistic choices construct gendered poetic subjectivity through an explicitly Feminist Critical Discourse Analytic framework (Lazar, 2007). While some studies have adopted linguistic, stylistic, or CDA-oriented approaches (Khan & Ali, 2016; Yaqoob et al., 2024), sustained micro-level FCDA of South Asian women’s Anglophone poetry remains comparatively underexplored. To address this gap, this study adopts a qualitative feminist critical discourse-stylistic framework, combining Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of text, discursive practice, and social practice with Sara Mills’s feminist stylistics. Twelve purposely selected poems are analyzed with attention to pronouns and temporal deixis, naming practices, verb choice and clause structure, modality, syntactic negation, imperatives, cosmic and architectural metaphors, translingual markers, and spatial representations. The analysis shows that Unnahar’s poetry constructs female subjectivity through distinct, intersecting discursive positions: the daughter inheriting maternal authority, the collective translator of intergenerational trauma, the reclaimer of domestic and spatial architectures, the hybrid postcolonial traveler, the resilient survivor, and the autonomous architect of the self. This study demonstrates that Unnahar’s poetry does not present womanhood as a fixed or essential category; instead, it constructs female selfhood as a fluid, relational, and active textual performance. Most significantly, it contributes to postcolonial feminist literary linguistics by illustrating how micro-level grammatical analysis clarifies the political and stylistic mechanics of contemporary Pakistani Anglophone poetry.