A Symbolic Representation of Women’s Oppression in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Burqa

Abstract

This study examines how the burqa in A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini serves not only as a cultural garment but also as an effective symbolic and sociolinguistic marker that shapes the realities of Afghan women. Despite the feminist and postcolonial scholarly discussion of the burqa, it has, in most cases, been addressed as a background to the text and not as a main sociolinguistic object that should be subjected to systematic analysis. This paper is an answer to that gap by offering the burqa as a symbolic, discursive, and semiotic resource indexing power, identity, and gendered subjectivity in the novel and the contemporary media discourse. Sociolinguistic analysis, semiotic interpretation, and critical discourse analysis (CDA) are used in the study as a qualitative, interpretive study design. The primary data are the scenes in A Thousand Splendid Suns related to the veil of the body and are enriched with a corpus of media (BBC, UN Women, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, CNN, Reuters, AP News) to present the discursive constructions of the veil in Afghanistan at a contemporary time. Findings indicate that the burqa is a multi-layered sign, a passive garment, not an object. It organizes speech, silence, embodiment, and movement of space. Media and literary discourses not only create the meanings of sexuality; they also contest them. The burqa both permits and facilitates oppression and strategic action. This work, in which the semiotic, discursive, and ecological aspects of the burqa are anticipated over time, contributes to the theoretical and empirical explanation of how the symbols of veiling are used in the systems of power and sociolinguistic meaning. It provides a twisting interpretation, which goes beyond reductive binaries and places the experience of Afghan women within a broader web of debates, discourses of media, and lived lives.  Thus, the work will not only be a contribution to the Hosseini scholarship but also help to open the sociolinguistic discourse of veiling to the field of fiction, where symbols are dense.