Discursive construction of gender justice in Pakistan: A corpus-based analysis of Pakistani women's blogs

The blogosphere acts as a vital arena of discursive contestation for marginalised groups in stratified societies and has been extensively used by feminist scholars to explore women's voices. This study examines the discursive practices of Pakistani women in the blogosphere, focusing on how they represent themselves in relation to their imagined interlocutors and other social entities. Drawing on insights from Fraser's gender justice theory and Bhaskar's critical realism, the study employs corpus-based critical discourse analysis as its methodological framework to analyse women's discursive practices and the cultural and economic inequalities manifested in them. The findings reveal women bloggers using negated, catenative, semi-modal, and copular predicative constructions to signal resistance, articulate agency and obligation, and evaluate sociocultural forces that constrain their agency. These discursive strategies point to a gendered social hierarchy that gives rise to interconnected cultural and economic inequalities for women in Pakistan. The study offers a novel discursive perspective on Fraser's critical political theory by integrating it with a critical realist perspective to retroductively infer plausible underlying social mechanisms through which gender-based injustices are produced and sustained.