Gender Subjugation Revisited; a Study of Mahesh Dattani’s Play Dance like a Man

Abstract

Traditional gender roles cast men as rational, strong, protective, and decisive; they cast women as emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive. These gender roles have been used very successfully to justify inequities, which still occur today, such as excluding women from equal access to leadership and decision-making positions. Of course, not all men accept patriarchal ideology, and those who don’t—those who don’t believe, for example, that because men generally have been endowed by nature with stronger muscles, they have been endowed with any other natural superiority—are often derided, by both patriarchal men and women, as weak and unmanly, as if the only way to be a man were to be a patriarchal man. This paper aims at highlight the ways in which patriarchal gender roles are destructive for men as well as for women. Traditional gender roles dictate that men are supposed to be strong (physically powerful and emotionally stoic), they are not supposed to cry because crying is considered a sign of weakness, a sign that one has been overpowered by one’s emotions.