STYLING FEMALE IDENTITY: AN IDEO-STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF GENDER, POWER, AND RESISTANCE IN MOHAMMED HANIF’S OUR LADY OF ALICE BHATT

Abstract

This article examines the ideological construction of female identity in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti through an ideo-stylistic approach that brings feminist stylistics into dialogue with critical stylistics. Rather than treating female identity as a fixed category, the study understands it as a contested textual and social formation produced through language, bodily description, naming, clothing, dialogue, focalization, metaphor, irony, and representations of action and thought. The analysis focuses primarily on Alice Bhatti and, where necessary, Sister Hina Alvi as a contrasting female subjectivity. Close reading of the novel demonstrates that Hanif repeatedly places the female body under surveillance and turns appearance, clothing, sexuality, religion, class, caste, professional status, and marriage into sites of ideological negotiation. Alice’s body is described through anatomical and grotesque imagery, while her clothing becomes a strategy of self-protection against the male gaze. Her linguistic behaviour is similarly regulated: she carefully controls her words, avoids eye contact, negotiates between Punjabi, Urdu, and English, and manages bodily movement in anticipation of social judgement. At the same time, the novel’s irony, satire, exaggeration, and grotesque humour expose the absurdity and violence of the social structures that police women. Sister Hina Alvi further complicates the representation by providing an alternative female voice that questions marriage, religious categorization, and conventional femininity. The article argues that Hanif’s style performs a double ideological function: it represents the mechanisms through which female identity is constrained while simultaneously disrupting those mechanisms through irony, narrative distance, female speech, and resistant characterization. The study contributes to scholarship on Pakistani English fiction by demonstrating how detailed stylistic analysis can reveal the ideological processes through which gendered identities are constructed, contested, and renegotiated.