Thespians in print: Gender portrayal in Pakistani English print media

The depiction of gender in Western media has been widely examined by researchers. This study intends to throw light on the current representation of women in Pakistani entertainment print media. Data were collected from four national newspapers including Dawn, The Nation, Daily Times, and The News for a period of 1 month. The techniques of Multimodal Corpus Linguistics and Content Analysis were opted to process data, and a blend of Feminist Stylistics and Critical Discourse Analysis methods was selected to analyze it. Results showed that women were overrepresented in entertainment news; however, discourse used to portray women was found asymmetrical when compared with that of men. The study attempted to show a wider picture of the gendered role of women in modern Pakistan.