Gender Dynamism: Deconstructed and Reconciled in Divakaruni’s Sister of My Heart and Rao’s Girls Burn Brighter

Abstract

In Indian society, a “boy baby” is another name for family income, a social leader, and a source of dowry.  A girl baby’s connotative gender dynamic is to digest social humiliation and to be silent before all arrangements are made to make her inferior before menfolk. Sudha’s mother-in-law in Sister of My Heart took her to a temple to pray for a ‘boy baby’.  These social narratives accelerate biological difference.  In Girls Burn Brighter, Poornima’s father said, “Your mother had a dream, … if we named you Poornima, we’d have a boy next.” Androcentric society expects women to sew, cook, and rear children. Postmodern psychoanalysts construct a new discourse. Because women, in cities or rural areas, teach, write novels or poetry, drive, and can be class toppers… police officers. They can even run shops or any business firm. Even though women bear the same tag of the "Second Sex", that is, being inferior to men. If women can perform "mannish" work, then postmodern feminists agreeably suggest a new discourse: reconciliation of gender treatment by the society for the society. The paper tends to demonstrate the gender status of traditional Indian society through the exclusive lens of gender dynamism, highlighting the dichotomy of gender performativity of females, and finally proposes to reverse the existing concept of agency to reconcile honour or power with performativity, not arbitrarily with gender, in the light of the two novels:

1. Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (1999)
2. Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao (2018)