Female Deconstruction and Discursivity in Hamid’s Exit West: A Case Study

Abstract

With the emergence of post-structuralism during third and fourth waves of feminism, the women empowerment and gendered based, discursively de/constructed ideologies have deictically gained significance. The present study analyzes the deconstruction of female representations in Hamid’s ‘Exit West’, a postmodernism novel. The research employs Baxter’s (2003) Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) to analyze the extracts related to Nadia’s character in the selected novel. The findings of the study suggest that language is a site of manifesting construction and deconstruction because language not merely constitutes reality but is also constituted by the socio-political and historical influences. Moreover, in the very novel, Nadia’s character is an embodiment of female empowerment as the language used or associated with her character, clearly depicts an aspect of deconstruction on the part of female representations in this postmodern world of multiple realities/identities.