Homogenizing Gender and Disability: Mahesh Dattani’s Tara

Abstract

Like race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, gender and disability are one of identity categories. These are social, cultural, and political constructions. Gender theorists reject the view that gender is natural or essential to body. Liberal thinkers believe in the categorization for instance; male and female, masculinity and femininity. They expect from them separate roles and behaviours. To them anatomical and physiological differences are guiding principles. By contrary, gender critics distinguish sex and gender to expose the baseless assumptions and associations about gender. They distinguish gender from sex. Likewise, disability critics raise their fingers against all those forces which help conditioning disability natural and there is no hope for them who are with certain physical deformities. In this paper, I shall try to explore how Dattani as a serious playwright in his play Tara clubs gender and disability to examine and evaluate unjustly operation of social, cultural, political, and economic machinery.