Negotiating Tradition and Modernity: Gender Roles and Culture in Selected Pakistani TV Dramas

Abstract

The Pakistani television dramas contain strong cultural texts that ridicule and create the social image of gender, tradition and modernity. The paper will be a critical analysis of the ways in which gender roles in the selected HUM TV dramas were created and negotiated, that is, the series Udaari (2016), Parizaad (2021), Zard Patton Ka Bann (2024), and Tann Mann Neel (2024). The study relies on the feminist critique of the media and evaluates how masculinity and femininity have been produced on the media to character growth, plotting and the visual storytelling and questions the gendered representation of honor, morality, family needs and social status. The paper employs the notion of gender performativity by Judith Butler to discuss how gender identities are actively operated/managed through the frames of the culture, and the theory of Male Gaze by Laura Mulvey to discuss the visual regimes that define the locations of the characters in relation to the patriarchal spectatorship. By qualitative approach, which relies on the analysis of textual and visual content, the selected scenes, dialogues, and character arc are addressed to answer the research questions. The findings suggest that even though these dramas have a tendency to support the patriarchal frameworks with the acts of normativity and gendered morality, it has also created space of resistance as it foreshadows other masculinities, female agency and the problems of traditional power structures. Locating the contemporary Pakistani dramas into the context of feminist theoretical debate, the research study will contribute to the existing discourses of media in terms of gender and culture in South Asian area whereby television drama is the lively site of bargaining tradition and modernity.