GENDER REPRESENTATION IN PAKISTANI X DISCOURSE: A CORPUS-ASSISTED STUDY OF MALE AND FEMALE USERS

Abstract

This article examines gender representation in Pakistani X discourse through a corpus-assisted analysis of 4,000 public posts, comprising 2,000 female-authored and 2,000 male-authored tweets. Guided by corpus-assisted discourse studies and social actor representation, the study investigates how women and men are represented and how lexical and collocational patterns construct gendered meanings in Pakistani digital discourse. The analysis focuses on frequent gender-related lexical fields, hashtags, collocations and concordance patterns. The findings show that female-authored posts more strongly foreground women’s collective agency, rights, safety, dignity, violence, harassment and feminist mobilisation. Women are represented not only as victims or survivors but also as protesters, citizens, workers and claim-making social actors. Male-authored posts display a more ambivalent pattern: they include support for women’s empowerment and responsible masculinity, but also foreground men’s rights, #MenToo, false allegations and male grievance. Across both subcorpora, gendered meanings are repeatedly constructed around honour, control, choice, responsibility, empowerment, safety and patriarchy. The study argues that Pakistani X functions as a contested digital space where gender is negotiated through activism, resistance, moral argument and counter discourse. It contributes to gender discourse studies, Pakistani digital media research and corpus assisted analysis of social media discourse in Pakistan’s contemporary online public sphere.