Masculinities in contemporary Pakistani cinema
Hussain, Babar (2023) Masculinities in contemporary Pakistani cinema. PhD thesis, UCA.
- Restricted Access Documents
- Details
![[thumbnail of BHussainPhDthesis.pdf]](https://research.uca.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/application_pdf.png "BHussainPhDthesis.pdf")
This thesis explores the representation of masculinity in contemporary Pakistani cinema and considers how this representation has evolved in response to the socio-political conditions in Pakistan. I examine theories of masculinity and narratives associated with culture and Islam, provided by conventional and contemporary scholars, to ascertain what masculinity means within the Pakistani context and how it is constructed and portrayed through Pakistani films. Through the textual analysis of cinematic texts and representative films, this thesis unravels how the conflicting discourses related to male hegemony and women's submissiveness are interrelated with the Pakistani state’s appropriation of different versions of Islam to create a uniform Islamic identity.
The main objective of this study is to focus on the role that socio-political conditions, religion and culture play in shaping both the expression of masculinity among Pakistani males and how masculinity is portrayed in Pakistani films. Western and modern Islamic feminist thought takes masculinity as a socially constructed and performed subjective position; however, the cultural and orthodox Islamist Ulemas describe it as ‘biological’ and given by Allah. Through a comprehensive analysis of Pakistan’s cinematic past, I analyse how these two constructivist and essentialist views are being portrayed and how men express their manhood in Pakistani films. My research focuses on three historical moments in which social and political shifts have resulted in a problematising of gender identities in Pakistan: namely, 1960s post-colonial cinema; the 1980s Islamisation period of General Zia-ul-Haq; and post-9/11 contemporary Pakistani cinema. All three eras have presented a different version of manhood in Pakistani films. Pakistani cinema has only recently attracted scholarly attention, and the focus of the rising scholarship in this field remains quite Eurocentric in that it largely ignores the socio- political linkage without which an analysis of masculinity in Pakistani films remains incomplete. In this study, I explore the different iterations of masculinity presented in Pakistani cinema and consider how they relate to Pakistani nationalism and the country’s patriarchal culture.
Actions (login required)
 |
Edit View |