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251247

‘Because I am a Girl’: Identity and Positioning in Afghani Women Narratives

Article

Last updated: 30 Jan 2023

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Abstract

This study investigates how Afghani women position themselves and others in gender-based violence (GBV) narratives. It examines how they simultaneously construct their identities. The data belong to the Afghani Women Writing Project (AWWP), a website launched in 2009, as an attempt to give voice to silenced Afghani women before, during and after Taliban regime. The study adopts a qualitative methodology of analysing a select number of narratives using Bucholtz and Hall (2005) Identity Framework, with special focus on the indexicality principle, which informs how identity is linguistically encoded via the different lexical, structural and pragmatic resources in the narrative. The results of the micro-linguistic analysis are further analysed in the light of Bamberg's (1997, 2004) model of positioning, which examines how narrators position themselves vis-à-vis the other participants in the narrative, the outer environment, and most importantly, themselves. Findings show two opposing identity positions. First, the narrators are positioned as agents, in control of events and has the ability to change. Second, the story characters within the narratives are positioned as victims of different forms of GBV, totally submissive to different forms of oppression. These findings scaffold the growing assumption that narratives are identity-construction tools in discursive interaction.

DOI

10.21608/cse.2022.130478.1113

Keywords

Positioning, Identity, narratives, gender-based violence, Afghani Women Writing Project (AWWP)

Authors

First Name

Nihal

Last Name

Sarhan

MiddleName

N.

Affiliation

Department of English, Faculty of Al-Alsun, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt.

Email

nihal_nagi@alsun.asu.edu.eg

City

Cairo

Orcid

0000-0003-3620-4526

Volume

2022

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

31243

Issue Date

2022-08-01

Receive Date

2022-03-29

Publish Date

2022-08-15

Page Start

46

Page End

64

Print ISSN

0575-1624

Online ISSN

2682-2504

Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/article_251247.html

Detail API

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=251247

Order

5

Type

Original Article

Type Code

738

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Cairo Studies in English

Publication Link

https://cse.journals.ekb.eg/

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Details

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Article

Created At

22 Jan 2023