Women's discursive agency: an investigation of perlocutionary effects in the qur'anic narrative

This study examines the perlocutionary effects of utterances attributed to selected female figures in the Qur'anic narrative within a speech act framework. The previous studies that have examined the reported speech of the female in the Qur'an are either rhetorical, thematic, or exegetical, but very little has been paid to the textually evidenced effects produced by their reported speech within the narrative structure of the text. The present study examines the verses that contain utterances with known consequences in different communicative settings, which are identified as direct speech by eight female figures: Maryam bint Imran, mother and sister of Musa, the Wife of Pharaoh, the Queen of Sheba , the woman who disputed, the Wife of Al-Aziz and the mother of Maryam. Employing Austin and Searle's speech-act theory, the study adopts a qualitative interpretive framework in which female utterances are coded based on speech act categories and examined for their perlocutionary outcomes. The results indicate that women's speech in the Qur'an creates perlocutionary effects such as life preservation, political and faith transformation, and legislative reform. This research proposes an analytical model applicable to other Qur'anic figures, prophetic discourse, and cross-scriptural comparison; therefore, it advances methodological approaches to gendered discourse in sacred texts.