Sexual Politics
In the play, Tara one can find how personal relationships become political, at the heart; they are the factors sex and gender. In the famous quote of Simone de Beauvoir, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’ she claims that one is not born but becomes one, she distinguishes between sex and gender.
The distinction between sex and gender has been crucial to the long-standing feminist effort to debunk the claim that anatomy is destiny; sex is understood to be the invariant, anatomically distinct, and factic aspects of the female body, whereas gender is the cultural meaning and form that that body ac- quires, the variable modes of that body’s acculturation. (35)
With this distinction intact, gender is by definition unnatural; being a female and being a woman are two ways very different sorts of being. The sex of an individual is given by destiny but the gender to be male or female is decided or more like is constructed by the society. This construction determines the identity of a sex in the society, the female sex considered as unwanted one, the one which the other whose only work is to work on the domestic front and bear children.
The male sex is the epitome of humanity, the rational being through whom the female sex is defined. The play also highlights the same point where female child is looked beyond the male one. Tara the female protagonist of the play is made to live a life of a disabled one, though by nature she is privileged to have the third leg. The society works in a way, which sees all the privileges and advantages for the male as in Chandan, the twin of Tara.