Rethinking Gender in Hinduism
Online Lecture Series

Less well known and commented upon, however, is the way both of the traditional authors of the work, the ṛṣis Vālmīki and Vyāsa, are dedicated to harping on this theme of sexual violence by overdetermining it with episodes of repeated physical and verbal assaults against the same figures as well as multiple assaults against a striking number of less central female characters. At the same time, the poets are at pains to create backstories that serve to provide justifications and explanations for the sexually anomalous situations in which their narratives place their central female characters. 

Moreover, a series of episodes runs through both poems that call into question the seeming fluidity and indeed the very concept of gender, as the poets dwell upon specific anxiety of retributive gender transformation, almost universally, of men into women or fictive women. 

This presentation will argue that through these representations of gender and sexuality, the Sanskrit epics both register deeply rooted attitudes about these critical issues and serve as vehicles for their dissemination of the concepts of gender normativity that continue to inflect thinking and practice of gender to the present day in South Asian society. These attitudes, of course, are by no means unique to the cultures of that region. They are, unfortunately, found in almost all patriarchal cultures around the world. This being the case, the South Asian representation of gender should be of interest to scholars of this subject in virtually all areas of the humanities and social sciences.