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.