CULTURAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF DOMESTIC RELATIONSHIP PASHTUN FOLK TAPPA: A QUALITATIVE ANALYSIS OF GENDER, CONTROL, AND VIOLENCE

Abstract

This paper concerns the construction and communication of domestic relationships, gendered control, and violence within the Pashtun society using Pashto folk tappa (two-line oral poetry). The study employs a qualitative, constructivist-interpretivist research design based on a purposive corpus of Pashto tappas (n = 50) collected directly from girls and women across different Pashto dialect regions, alongside in-depth semi-structured interviews with the same participants to document the performance contexts, meanings, and interpretations of these tappas. The thematic content analysis was used to analyze the data based on the framework of everyday Gender Violence and hidden transcriptshe results indicate that tappay repeatedly present the domestic space as a place of routinized fear, intimidation, and normalized marital violence, and also focus on silencing practices, emotional oppression, and honor-based moral justifications that trains the voices and choices of women. In place of the themes of agency denied and gendered vulnerability, heightened by conflict, ideas of moral counter-claims, which redefine womanhood and challenge coercive masculinity, are also represented in the corpus as markers of constrained but meaningful resistance. In general, the analysis of tappa is understood as a cultural repository that is capable of reproducing patriarchal norms and permissible channel in the society.