No Room of Their Own! Gender Politics in Aruni Kashyap’s The House with a Thousand Stories

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Gender studies is a seminal area of critical discussion in today’s academia, but the term gender is extremely slippery and often interchanged with sex. But in actuality, sex is one’s biological identity, while gender is an artificial construction grounded in sociology and gender roles are culturally defined, thereby, bound by time and place. Indeed, gender refers to “those characteristics of socio-cultural origin which are conventionally associated with different sexes.” (Goring et al 248) So, theterm ‘gender’ points to “the social classification of men and women as masculine and feminine.” (Oakley 16) Moreover, this artificial construction of gender is dominated by men and women have been given a secondary place in the hierarchy of this construction due to their physical weakness and reproductive power. Men have always restricted and controlled women in society by specifying their space and limiting their area of action. Therefore, each culture has built a repertoire which fixes norms, rules and attributes that women should obey in order to be subordinate to men. Indeed, a woman is not given any autonomous identity in society by men who consider women as commodity. Actually, a woman is not born as a woman rather as a female, but society, dominated by men, turns her into a woman restricting her into a liminal world. Simon De Beauvoir has described this fact in The Second Sex in the following words:
“One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in the society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature… ” (273).
So, a woman is constructed by the society through its cultural codes and practic...

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..., Paul, Hawthorn, Jeremy, and Mitchell, Domhnall. Studying Literature: The Essential Companion. London: Hodder Education, 1st Pub 2001. Rpt 2008. Print.
3. Kashyap, Aruni. The House with a Thousand Stories. Delhi: Penguin India, 2013. Print.
4. Mcleod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.Print.

5. Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics (1969). London: Hart-Davis, 1971. Print
6. Oakley, Ann. Sex, Gender and Society. London: Temple Smith, 1972. Print.
7. Rushdie, Salman. Shame(1983). London: Vintage, 1995. Print.
8. Ruthven, K.K., Feminist Literary Studies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1980. Print.
9. Shaw, Bernard. Man and Superman. Ed. A.C.Ward. Delhi:Orient Longman, 1954, Print.
10. Tolan, Fiona. “Feminisms.” Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Patricia Waugh. Noida: OUP. 1st Pub 2006. Rpt 2011. Print.

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