Title : Gender Representation in Myanmar Literary Works in English

Author(s) : Tin Moe Yi

Pages : 101-121

Abstract in English : 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
MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities Regular 20.2, 2017
102
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.