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Title Transgender in Popular Culture: An Analysis of Trans Representation in Pakistani and American Movies

Author(s) Farva Rubab

Abstract The present research is an attempt to explore the visual and verbal practices employed by the transgender characters in popular media such as movies to propagate certain ideologies. The analysis of the visual and verbal practices has been done to find out the implicature behind them. To investigate the ideologies propagated through the representation of transgender characters in popular culture, two recently released movies i.e. Joyland (2022) and Anything’s Possible (2022) have been analyzed linguistically and semiotically in the research. The study in hand begins with the discussion on popular culture and how it shapes people’s perception and attitude towards certain ideologies. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches have been employed to investigate the ideologies propagated through the representation of transgender in Pakistani and American movies. The first section is quantitative, where frequency of occurrences of visual and verbal practices based on various themes such as binary structure, political, social and gendered divisions have been documented by applying Content Analysis (CA) adapted from Capuzza and Spencer (2017). Whereas, the second section deals with qualitative analysis, which employs a triangular method by combining the Feminist Model of Text by Mills (1995), Kress & Leeuwen’s (1996) Social Semiotic approach and Focus Group Discussion (FGD) by Krueger (2000). Moreover, for the validation of the analysis of the selected texts and images, the researcher has conducted two focus group discussions: one with a group of linguists and one with non-linguists. The research indicates that there is a favorable change in transgender representation. Even with shortcomings, the two movies under consideration have improved transgender representation in popular culture which suggests that the better and positive media representation of transgender, can help break the stereotypes towards their existence.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Faculty of Arts and Humanities

Department English (Multan Campus)

Language English

Publication Date 2025-08-21

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