in Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit. As a result, noth-
ing is seen as futile in the end; there are salvation
and hope that every single living and nonliving
being will ultimately be set free from the bondage
of repetitive historical processes or Karma. This is
why Sanskrit poetics eschew tragic endings, and
tragedy as a genre is nonexistent in ancient India.
Abhijñānashākuntala’s tragic heroine Shakuntala is
saved from ultimate despair right at the last moment
by the fourth- or fifth-century playwright Kalidasa.
This is the norm in ancient Indian literature.
While the West has a rich tradition of meditat-
ing on futility, the East has struggled to show futil-
ity as a paralyzing emotion to be discarded by the
individual at all costs. The Buddha sees futility as a
disease to be disposed of. We know of an anecdotal
story where the Buddha exhorts one not to analyze
life in a morbid manner but rather to find out ways
to come out of the resultant inertia brought about by
depression. The Buddha draws an analogy between
an arrow-struck man and the need to heal him
rather than telling him of the arrow’s origins. This is
the hallmark of Eastern ancient literatures. There is
no scope for Dante Alighieri’s “All hope abandon,
ye who enter here” (the divine coMedy). Futility is
thus seen as a luxury we can ill afford.
See also Byron, George Gordon Byron,
Lord: don Juan; Camus, Albert: stranGer,
the; Eliot, T. S.: wasteLand, the; Greene, Gra-
ham: heart oF the Matter, the; Hemingway,
Ernest: sun aLso rises, the; Vonnegut, Kurt:
sLauGhterhouse-Five; Williams, Tennessee:
cat on a hot tin rooF; Yeats, William Butler:
poems.
FURTHER READING
King James Bible Online. Available online. URL:
http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org. Accessed
January 22, 2010.
Subhasis Chatterjee
gender
In common usage, the word gender most typically
refers to the perceived and natural differences
between men and women. In literary studies, the
term more specifically refers to how individuals
define themselves and how they are evaluated by
others on the basis of gender. Gender is often associ-
ated with feminism (women’s activism against gen-
dered oppression), feminists (those who study and
advocate women’s equality), and Women’s Studies
(interdisciplinary academic programs dedicated to
the study of gender and women’s gendered oppres-
sion) because one must understand how gender
functions before one can examine the oppression
or lack thereof that gendered behavior entails. The
study of gender is then also the study of power
relationships—of how one’s gender, typically the
male gender, gives one a power advantage over the
other gender. Thus, founders of Women’s Studies
and feminist theory such as the French psycho-
analytic feminist theorists Simone de Beauvoir, Julia
Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, and Luce Irigaray have
helped to formulate our current understandings of
gender.
At the most basic level, the theories of these
early psychoanalytic feminists assume that human
behavior is learned and not innate. In other words,
men are not necessarily more naturally aggressive.
Instead, a critic applying gender theory would argue
that if the majority of the men in a particular group
are aggressive, this aggression is learned as part of
their “gender identity” as a man. “Gender roles,” in
turn, are the codes of behavior that a society expects
for one gender or another. These codes are learned
in childhood. According to this theory, children see
adults model gender-appropriate behavior, and then
their desire to be a member of that society impels
them to accept the modeled behavior as the best and
most appropriate for themselves and others. Adopt-
ing and practicing a “gender role” is therefore what
helps an individual to construct a “gender identity”
of who they are.
The American philosopher Judith Butler builds
on the work of these French theorists by arguing
that gender is performative. Butler’s premise is that
since gender entails a role, and roles are the culmi-
nation of actions, gender must also be a culmination
of actions. In making this claim, Butler extends the
idea that there is nothing intrinsic to gender identity
by showing that an individual can vary his or her
performance of gender from moment to moment.
In other words, every action, every choice, be it the
clothes we choose or the way in which we speak to40 gender