power structures” (ibid.: 204–5). The study of gender in this chapter has
accepted the second model but also recognized that some of these women’s roles
are also available to male devotees under certain circumstances. In the
devotional milieux, the female role of the Tamil “heroine” or Yas ́oda ̄, or a
cowherd girl, is empowering to the male and female devotees and dancers
because of its relational proximity to a male god. Narratives, song, and dance
enhance this fluidity of gender roles and cannot be seen as just a helpless
performances in a patriarchal universe.
In recent scholarship, the relationship between gender and sex is understood
in at least three ways. One way is to see gender and sex as homologous: they are
the same. According to this view the differences between “men” and “women”
are natural and essential; one’s gender is an inevitable result of the physiologi-
cal differences. A second way is to see the relationship as analogous. Gender con-
sciousness is understood to be based on socialization and lived experience; thus
gender symbolizes sex. Thus, some feminist thinkers and social scientists per-
ceive sex to be “natural while gender is cultural, subject to human variation
and construction” (Warne 1999: 142). This model accepts, to some extent, the
notion of a “normative heterosexuality grounded in biological nature, although
it allows for particular cultural constructions which transgress a strict linkage
of sex and gender” (ibid.). The third model sees sex and gender as heterogenous.
Sex and gender are both not natural and innate; in fact, gender may construct
sex. According to one position – in a range of positions that construct this model
- “sexual dimorphism is not absolute; ‘nature’ produces humans with a range
of combinations of hormones, chromosomes and sexual apparatuses” (ibid.).
The choice involving a male/female continuum is a human choice and a
conceptual construct. Power is central to the understanding of distinctions;
divisions and hierarchy are inherent in the act of “gendering.”
It is possible to discern, in the songs and rituals of the Hindu traditions, con-
cepts which seem to allow for all of these ways of thinking; though the second
way of interpreting the relationship between sex and gender may be more easily
discernible. It is when one moves into philosophical and theological essays that
one is urged to go beyond all dichotomies, including gender for the soul and for
the deity. At the human level, however, the devotees happily distinguish between
various gender roles but keep the boundaries permeable and fluid. There are
many kinds of femininities as there are many kinds of women, as we saw earlier.
Role-playing as a woman is not simply to feel weak in front of a patriarchal deity,
but to enjoy the many nuances of love in the situations framed by the conceit of
Tamil poems or Puranic/epic narratives.
Notes
1 There is a considerable body of literature on the hijracommunity of India. See, for
instance, the works of Serena Nanda and Gayatri Reddy.
2 That is, the lotus blossoms when it sees the sun.
586 vasudha narayanan