A Feminist Stylistic Analysis of Anti-feminist Poetry in English and Arabic

Abstract

Language plays a major role in all aspects of life. Communication is regarded as the most important of these aspects, as language is used on a daily basis by humanity either in written or spoken forms. Language is also regarded as the main factor of exchanging peoples’ cultures and traditions and in handing down these attributes from generation to generation. Thus, language is a fundamental element in identifying peoples’ ideologies and traditions in the past and the present. Despite these facts, the feminist linguists have objections to some of the language structures, demonstrating that language is gender biased to men. That is, language promotes patriarchal values. This pushed towards developing extensive studies to substantiate sexism in language. The main question is: is language really sexist? This study employs a feminist stylistic analysis to investigate these theories, and takes the anti-feminist poetry as a springboard for that, for it addresses multiple issues objected to by feminism. The model adopted in this study is Sara Mills’s (1995) Feminist Stylistics which analyzes different structures of language that oppose feminism; English and Arab modern anti-feminist poetry is the genre that is investigated in this study. Besides, this study aims at revealing the societies’ inherent views about women along with investigating the feminist essential claim; that language is sexist. This is done by conducting both qualitative and quantitative analyses on the data. The current study has concluded that language in its pure form is not sexist; rather sexism is a personal and well as a societal attitude. Furthermore, there are certain items, especially in English, that can be regarded since English does not have a feminine form on its own; still, such items can always be avoided and other neutral items can be used instead. Finally, this study recommends that a feminist practical approach is required to track and omit gender bias in language from school books as it has a major effect on the ideology of society. It also recommends to developing a feminist method to raise the awareness against the indirect forms of sexism that plague literature.