CHALLENGING MALE PRIVILEGES AND GENDER NORMS THROUGH THE USE OF HUMOUR BY PAKISTANI FACEBOOK USERS

Abstract

This study intends to explore humour and its use by Pakistani social media users to challenge male privileges and gender norms. Humour has been used for a long as a tool to speak truth to the power and challenge the power structures prevailing in a society at a particular time.  As we know that gender is a social construct that is employed by the power that be to establish its dominance over the opposite gender, different feminists have argued that humour can be an effective tool for subverting the dominant position of males in a patriarchal society. Moreover, the three-dimensional model presented by Fairclough provides us with an effective tool to analyze humour, its various forms and its subtle use to question the dominant position of man in Pakistani society. The study is delimited to analyze memes and texts generated by a Woman who seek gender equality in Pakistan and have been advocating equal rights for women. This study finds that humour can be an effective tool to challenge gender hegemony and male privilege. Employing parody, an irony, satire which are different forms of humour can be utilized to expose the so-called neutrality of the language and the power which is intended to serve by such use of language.