Gender Representation in Myanmar Literary Works in English

Abstract

Gender representation is significant in every country in South East Asia. In Myanmar, an Asian country, men and women have equal rights under Myanmar customary law, but there is still inequality in some situations. However, gender discrimination is not a prominent social feature; and awareness and understanding of this feature cannot be reached without a course to literary work, which is a reflection of Myanmar culture and Myanmar society. Therefore, to see how gender is represented in Myanmar society, short stories which reflect Myanmar real culture are chosen to be analyzed in this study. That is why, speech acts and some specific linguistic features are investigated and analyzed on the topic of how men and women are represented and portrayed in Myanmar short stories. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are conducted for analyzing the data; descriptive statistical analysis is used for quantitative method and sociolinguistic explanation is presented for qualitative method. Through speech act theory, it is found that there is no difference between males and females in using directives and assertive speech acts. In terms of linguistic features, it is found that reporting verbs, adverbs and adjectives used to portray male characters are described negatively rather than the features used for portraying the female characters. This seems to suggest that males have more negative images than females. Moreover, that the subjects of sentences in the data refer to males more than females is likely to imply that males are leaders and females followers in Myanmar society.