Comparative semiotics of womanhood: portrayal of Chinese and Pakistani women in contemporary paintings

3.1 Similarities in the visual representation

Similarities in the representation of Chinese and Pakistani women include loneliness, waiting, trauma, friendship among women, leisure activities, chores such as stitching, embroidery, and fetching water, relaxing, female beauty, variety of dressing and locale, and motherhood or single motherhood. Dissimilarities include violence, locale, and the more painful facial expressions of the Pakistani women. The shackles of social norms and the responsibilities of domestic life are more visible in Pakistani paintings. From the perspective of women’s issues, the Pakistani paintings offer multiple themes, such as loneliness, age, marriage, waiting, violence perpetrated on women by men, the state, and women, acid attacks on women by women, moralizing of women by women, desire for freedom, social oppression and patriarchal burden, abortion, single motherhood, trauma stigmatization, and inability to be oneself. However, the Chinese paintings mostly reflect loneliness, change, war, waiting, and disillusionment as challenges. The Pakistani paintings do not depict women with disabilities, doctors, scientists, or educated women, whereas the Chinese paintings do depict educated women and women with disabilities.

As Khurshid and Saba (2017: 552) point out, “Western feminism” constructs “the ‘Third World woman’ as a homogeneous category victimized by the inherently patriarchal cultures of their communities,” and as a result, “the political project of Western feminism has constructed Third World women as the ‘collective other’ by overlooking the vast complexity and diversity that exists among women in any context.” Therefore, it is important to understand that even if Pakistan is a patriarchal and underdeveloped country, Pakistani women cannot be considered or treated as a homogenous entity, because they have different levels of education, stability, and exposure. They face different challenges depending upon their social class or background. For example, some women have money and protection of social freedom as major issues, while others have personal space and freedom as their major issues. There are women who cause violence to other women, while wealth, personal space, or freedom are not their problems. As has been represented in the paintings as well, some women moralize, oppress, and perpetrate violence against other women. Issues, therefore, are multilayered and multifaceted in terms of Chinese and Pakistani women having different conditioning, sets of information, and socioeconomic conditions, but as residents of a global village, their femininities are multiplex.

3.2 Differences in the visual representation

Women face challenges in both contexts, but in the Chinese context, more psychological representation of those challenges can be found, while in the Pakistani context, both psychological and physical representation of those issues can be seen. Physical stasis, limitude, or barriers to freedom and open self-expression are visible in both contexts. Cats, along with cages, closed doors, and birds, etc., represent themes such as loneliness, oppression, autonomy, and freedom, etc. Fryer (2022: 27–28) points out that cats are symbolically linked to human beings due to “their perceived independence or autonomy and their relative wildness or untamedness,” “beauty,” “love and affection”, and indeed: “There are important links between cats and people or groups who, historically, have been ostracized, alienated or oppressed.” A desire for freedom represented through birds and caged birds is a common theme in Pakistani paintings (Riaz 2023).

The paintings show Chinese women as feeling stuck due to the environment or an unknown force, whereas the Pakistani paintings clearly reflect the environment, women as the agents of oppression, and the state, administration, and society as external forces. The women-to-women relationship in the Chinese paintings is not hostile; rather it is amicable. However, in the Pakistani paintings, multiple factors of oppression and violence based on women’s relationships to other women are highlighted. Pakistani women are modeled not only as victims but also as oppressors. Previous studies on gender representation in the Pakistani context have shown women to be represented as victims of patriarchal norms, the state or administrative structures, and violent men (Riaz 2022a, 2022b, 2021a, 2019). For centuries, women have been depicted as fragile and powerless. Although there was no tangible evidence of prehistoric societies differentiating tasks and status according to gender, prehistorians have also portrayed a binary vision of societies: strong, creative men and weak, dependent, passive women (Grossmann 2024). The present study also highlights a major concern that most of the femininities modeled in both Chinese and Pakistani paintings also represent passivity, tenderness, alienation, and weakness, as well as victimhood. This victimhood implies the presence of a perpetrator, which could be the state, the system, men, other women, or the victims’ own inability to stand up for themselves (Riaz 2023, 2022a, 2022b). Riaz (2021b), however, notes that there are quite a number of constructive representations of women’s courage and resilience in Pakistani paintings. The question arises whether Pakistani women, or more specifically all Pakistani women, are really as oppressed and marginalized as they are mostly represented. Not all Pakistani and Chinese women are limited to homes, kitchens, and drawing rooms; therefore, their pictorial models must include both “enabling and limiting factors,” dynamism, and “diverse capacities” (Grossmann 2024: 4), even if these spaces are represented in favorable colors. The meagerness, shallowness, silence, or absence of artistic resources in terms of manifold representations of female agency, professional contribution, and impact need to be addressed.

3.3 Stereotypes, authenticity, and politics of the representation

According to Van Es (2019: 3), stereotypes and symbolic boundaries can be “constructed, maintained and reinforced, as well as contested, challenged and resisted. They can be blurred and reconstructed.” The boundaries of womanhood within the Pakistani cultural context are similarly in flux and continuously being blurred, subverted, challenged, and changed, with oppression being represented as a constant factor. In many Pakistani paintings, parts of the female body such as the arms, neck, and belly are visible; however, many paintings also depict veiled women. Pakistani women do wear a veil; therefore, it is a clear and authentic representation. However, the veil has many interpretations in the global context.

In the Canadian context,

Muslim women, particularly those wearing the hijab [veil] are frequently robbed of their agency. They are ridiculed for their religious choices, asked to assimilate to Western norms and imagined as oppressed, passive, and uneducated. Ironically, the notion that they are oppressed in their own communities works to further marginalize them from mainstream society. As a result, they become vulnerable to hate crimes, sit in hostile classrooms and face unpleasant workplace environments. In sum, Muslim women are increasingly othered in mainstream society with the hijab playing a key role in this racialization process. (Nagra 2018: 276)

As a result, Muslim women, due to wearing a veil or covering their heads and bodies fully, experience heightened racism, discrimination, stigma, inequality, and a host of consequent challenges. How women belonging to a particular culture are represented is important, because what people belonging to an outside culture are exposed to about this culture may give rise to a climate of invisible misunderstandings, stereotyping, othering, prejudice, intolerance, discrimination, and loss of social and economic opportunities. As Coll et al. (2018: 342) put it: “Wars have been waged based on ethnic cleansing, religious persecution, and the role of women in society, among other cultural values.” Therefore, developing a clear understanding of the variety of dressing choice of all Pakistani women and what those choices connote in terms of their agency is crucial. Many women wear the veil as a choice because they feel more comfortable. One can veil and fly a plane. The veil itself does not limit agency. Agency, instead, is limited by what happens to a woman in the form of judgment, violence, and oppression or how she responds to such happenings. What matters is that a woman should be able to shift to a safer space after being slapped or abused by someone. What matters is her safety and happiness. If she feels more protected wearing a veil, then the veil is not the barrier. Therefore, the veil as a contributor to women’s agency, ease, and protection, and not as a barrier or a marker of oppression (Riaz 2019, 2022a), needs to be modeled, because judging the veil or dupatta means judging the choices of hundreds of women who find it suitable based on their socioeconomic and legal challenges, religious obligations, or personal preferences.

Although Pakistani women, particularly in the post-9/11 landscape, are considered to be and are portrayed as oppressed victims, the paintings, on the one hand, locate them in the prevalent debates on oppression and victimhood, while, on the other hand, portraying their dynamism to an extent. Hijab or burqa veils, for example, are highlighted as a symbol of female oppression in mainstream discourse. However, in the selected paintings, the hijab is visually delineated not only as an oppressive tool, but also as an item of clothing and a protective tool. It can be observed that some of the women represented in the paintings may be wearing the hijab, burqa, or dupatta, but walking and dancing as well. When women are sitting casually at home, they do not wear a dupatta. In some paintings, the dupatta is not framed in a negative or positive coloring but is only represented as an item of clothing. In many paintings, however, where the iconoclastic spirit of women is depicted, the depictions also dismantle existing stereotypical notions of Asian women’s passivity while simultaneously representing this passivity.

Loneliness is a prevalent theme in the paintings related to both cultures, i.e., in terms of socioeconomic milieux and modes of living. Women are portrayed sitting alone or with a cat, book, fruit, monkey, or bird made of straw in the same frame. Moazzam (2016) criticizes that because the most valuable currency in Asia is the “physical,” educated and financially independent women in China and Pakistan experience multiple challenges in getting married. On the one hand, they contribute to social and economic growth, while on the other hand, due to cultural norms, they suffer stigma, loneliness, rejection, exploitation, and emotional strain for the rest of their lives. They are considered unwanted and called “leftover women.” The same applies to divorced Pakistani women (Riaz 2020), who are marginalized and left out on multiple fronts. Feldshuh (2018), however, asserts that the media misrepresents the marriage crisis and educational trends for Chinese women. “The marriage rate in China remains largely universal; however, media representations of shengnü present female marriage patterns as a pressing cause for anxiety” (Feldshuh 2018: 5). Therefore, to maintain gender hierarchies, the media is contributing to mythmaking regarding single Chinese women, as well as their educational empowerment. These negative portrayals deviate from reality and influence women’s well-being negatively. Gong et al. (2017) also emphasizes that Chinese single women are depicted as in conflict with social ideologies, and such portrayals are inimical.

Issues concerning lonely women and burqa-clad women are issues of invisible misunderstandings because it is not clear if the participants in the paintings are comfortably alone or uncomfortably alienated. Similarly, women may be wearing a dupatta by choice, but invisible misunderstandings and politicization of cultural signs may give a negative coloring to the hijab or the dupatta. Women’s agency and safety are more important than appearance or nationality. Therefore, understanding female agency and autonomy, beyond the visual and what is semiotically represented or manipulated, is more important. Whether women are happy or sad, protected or unprotected is of greater concern than whether they are modern or conservative, Asian or American. Understanding multifarious meanings of clothes in relation to specific cultural contexts is crucial. I consider it a semiotic dilemma that what is apparent may be located on a continuum but because it is repeatedly represented in a specific way, it becomes what it is not or what it ought not to be. There is a gap between the sign and signified/cultural meanings. What is and what is represented are often quite different, which in my view constitutes a semiotic absurdity. The meaning a sign holds in one context becomes blurred in another simply because in this context a completely different meaning has been conventionally associated with the sign. Dealing with such clashes of meaning requires clarification and resistance.

Taking into account that the artists have paintings on many themes in their personal archives and galleries that were unable to be accessed, in the paintings selected through an extensive online search, many themes that can be found in the Chinese paintings cannot be found in Pakistani paintings, even though those themes can easily be observed in the lives of Pakistani women. For example, nuns, harvesters, fisherwomen, sportswomen, warrior women, wheelchair users, and female embroiderers, generals, and pilgrims, etc. portrayed in Chinese paintings couldn’t be found in Pakistani paintings, although Pakistani women engaged in domestic chores are depicted. Pakistani women are shown doing menial jobs; hence, the representation of well-educated, empowered, and modern female Pakistani professionals is missing.

In general, Chinese and Pakistani women are represented in the paintings as innocent, hardworking, beautiful, quiet, victims, mothers, students, dancers, musicians, and domestic workers, but the negative aspects of their womanhood are not depicted. The existing representations of Chinese and Pakistani women are also stereotypical because women are represented as obedient, sweet, subjugated and oppressed in relation to men (Biehl 2019; Cheng 1997; Feldshuh 2018; Jiang and Gong 2016; Liebler et al. 2015; Riaz 2019; Riaz 2021a, 2021b). It is an important finding of the present study that except for three Pakistani paintings, in which female-to-female violence and prejudice are depicted, women are represented in caring, helpful, and friendly colors, thus neglecting female-to-female oppression, antagonism, and jealousy. Such representations align with the existing decorative and soothing presence of women in media representations.

I argue that patriarchal oppression is not merely perpetrated by men in Chinese or Pakistani culture, or indeed broadly in any culture. In fact, it is an offshoot of climate, structural hierarchies, and gender-based hierarchies not only based on male aggression and superiority but also female-to-female power dynamics and prejudices. While not only constructive portrayals of women are needed, cultivating an understanding of the negative role of women in the lives of other men and women is also paramount. A woman cannot always be a victim. She can be an empowered trendsetter, as well as a strong survivor. Similarly, not all women are caring and helpful. Many women in domestic and professional spheres suffer due to other women. Therefore, the complicated dynamics of female-to-female relations should be represented to broaden the semiotics of womanhood and to understand diverse and toxic femininities.

3.4 Representation, culture, and semiotic modeling

Paintings are created for pleasure and aesthetic appeal. Although art reflects life, its main purpose is often to appeal to the viewer. The overall “semiotic modeling” (Yu 2021: 648) of womanhood that is developed through the signs used in the paintings, therefore, is marked by passivity, isolation, and static appearance to such an extent that it merely represents and models an aspect of reality but does not cover the multitudinous activities that take place and are performed by women on a daily basis in China and Pakistan. As paintings mostly represent female portraits and natural scenery, the visual grammar from cultural, socioeconomic, and professional perspectives is limited and incomplete. Even the multiplex of multilayered realities that unfolds in a given moment in the lives of a few women from a single household is not comprehensively modeled. This reflects the meagerness and stasis of representational signs, which cannot capture the essence of an unbounded and evolving reality as it takes place in the moving and happening world. The paintings as semiotic models show dress choices but cannot reflect the associated multifarious combinations of signs and their meanings as perceived and contested in life. For instance, globally, the dichotomous and contested meanings of the dupatta as a protection, comfort, barrier, racial label, religious obligation, cultural tradition, honor, modesty, manipulation, exclusion, distinction, freedom, and freedom perceived as lack of freedom cannot be modeled through the same sign or image. It can only be perceived by the viewer. Even if one woman has ever been embarrassed, judged, refused, or excluded for wearing the dupatta, the paintings do not reflect that individual or collective embarrassment.

Similarly, a woman sitting alone or idle doesn’t model the essence of even one day of a woman’s life but is simply a sign for one moment that is modeled in the painting; it cannot be symbolic or representative of the entire female community. One image represents an aspect of womanhood but does not model the complexity associated with womanhood in relation to a culture. Though repeated visual representations of women sitting lonely or idle create a model of loneliness, it may not necessarily be as prevalent as can be seen in the paintings. On the other hand, it may also be more prevalent than it has been modeled semiotically. It may be a more subtle, nuanced, or dynamic modeling of the “reality,” a “semiotic model” of the “existential model,” thus, a new model in its own rank, or a representation of the “signified,” “object,” or “referent” (Yu 2021: 651). On the whole, the semiotic signs and/or models, therefore, are static compared to the ever-changing and multitudinous and complex nature of reality, signified, or referent belonging to a culturescape. Women belonging to any culture, therefore, must not be perceived through such a static and narrow lens of a few images, models, or representations, because images do not model or represent the totalities of the realities or the multiplexes of meanings.

3.5 Semiotic idealism, misinterpretation, and marginalization

By semiotic idealism, I mean an expectation that a semiotic model should represent cultural realities in their totality. Semiotic idealism is unattainable, because cultures have subcultures, subjective realities, and dynamic facets that can neither be represented nor generalizable when represented. Models and representations, even when incomplete and politicized, definitely help in understanding reality but can also cause misinformation. The facets, shades, or gray areas often cannot be comprehensively modeled and represented and may lead to manipulation, misinformation, loss, and racism. Therefore, generalizations and labeling should be avoided.

In the case of the present study, some paintings model loneliness by using various signs better than other paintings that do not combine various signs, such as a cat, gaze, body language, fruit, bird, and white curtains. Paintings are nuanced semiotic models of reality which may or may not holistically “supersede” the “existential models” (Yu 2021: 647–648) simply because the contested meanings cannot be embedded in the same model which may mean one thing for one person and another for another person depending upon their familiarity with and preference for certain cultural models of existence. Both a “model” perceived “both as a verb (preferably) and a noun” and a “sign” or a “representation,” “which to differing degrees imply a static image of a targeted and indeed closed system” (Yu 2021: 656), are too static, subjective, and fixed temporally and spatially to represent or model the essence of a reality that they supersede in a cross-cultural scenario, especially when people belonging to the same socioeconomic setting have diverse mental models, significations, and perceptions of the signs and experiences in their minds. Both signs and models are static due to their meagerness in conveying the totality of meaning, and simultaneously in flux because they generate various models of reality in the minds of different viewers. For one viewer, a lonely woman in a painting may merely represent beauty, silence, rest, and solitude, while for another the same woman may be symbolic of the loneliness experienced by countless women on a daily basis. At the same time, a single image may neither model nor represent the diverse experiences of loneliness of countless women. Thus, what is represented may be ideologically loaded, resulting in either a hyper-representation or an underrepresentation that lacks authenticity. It may exhibit “modelity,” which is “relevance” or “connectability” to the extent of being relevant on some level, but despite presenting a “multi-source symbiosis” (Zeng 2024: 211) of visual fabrication and being a complex semiotic model, it may not represent the complicated cultural dynamics or facets, and thus may not be “context-specifically more efficacious” (Yu 2021: 652).

From a cultural standpoint, despite modeling loneliness, the woman may not represent the essence, extent, or intensity so far as the cultural signified is concerned, and therefore, the existential model will have an underrepresented semiotic model. It is pertinent to emphasize that absolute perfection is unattainable, and visual models, signs, or representations depict aspects of reality. Yu (2021: 657) also supports that there is no such thing as a perfect model or direct visual representation. Every model is a new model which is envisioned and carefully or casually constructed by an artist. “What follows is that it is down to the audience, including both admirers and critics to differing degrees and of various types, to either appreciate, or accept, or refute these artists’ models, which are the products of their envisioning and presentations” (Yu 2021: 657). However, as images are used to convey ideologies and considering the propagandist nature of visual discourse, misinformation may lead to destruction and overgeneralization. Therefore, misinterpreting is a more critical issue and concern than interpreting. As a result, while appreciating that creativity is natural and even bad art is art, interpreting the images using the “authenticity lens” is paramount so that marginalization of people belonging to a specific culture may be prevented.

It is important to create diverse creative models of information related to womanhood because models inform, and information is a source of evolution. Yu (2023: 177) emphasizes that “Culture is a biological instinct to acquire information through modeling, that is, learning by models. This instinct is at work, or is realized, in specific acts of such modeling, resulting in what can be called ‘cultural practices’ (behavioral and/or cognitive) and ‘cultural artifacts.’”

To summarize the above-mentioned discussion, in my view, considering cultural complexities unknown to people outside the boundaries of the culture, models and representations can basically take the following three forms, while the same painting may include parts that underrepresent, partially represent, and hyper-represent reality.

1. Due to being static, the paintings may not represent the complexities of reality but only aspects of it, which may help in making sense of the reality but lack authenticity and, therefore, be unreliable. As a result, a model or visual representation of a Pakistani man carrying a gun cannot be used as a justification to label the entire Pakistani population as terrorist. A visual representation of a person doesn’t reflect the whole society. Moreover, as only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, accurate models can only be authenticated by those who live and breathe in a particular cultural setting.

2. While attaining exactitude is impossible, there can be nuanced, deeper, subtle, dynamic, and more creative models and visual representations which sometimes make unknown realities known to larger audiences living inside or outside the cultural periphery. These models and representations can vary in authenticity, especially when the focus is on creativity and there is no risk of labeling anyone. When creatively depicted, a garden will represent a garden and a cigar will represent a cigar. A man carrying a gun, a veiled woman, and a lonely woman, which are more “misinterpretable” signs in the present scenario, will represent and model aspects of realities and not the complexities of realities and meanings.

3. Some models are creative to such an extent that they give a surreal, idealistic, or exaggerated image of reality. Such models and representations are creatively acceptable but contextually or culture-specifically unreliable. Artists frequently employ unreal signs that nonetheless produce a profound impact.