The Gendered Body

This chapter deals with an episode in The Book of Peace of the Mahābhārata in which a spiritually powerful yet protean almswoman, Sulabhā, encounters a King Janaka. It enquires into what Janaka’s declamation against Sulabhā says about masculinist ideas of gender, body, and normativity, and how her responses lay out considerations about gender—how her bodily appearance determines her reception, an account of being human that accepts but renders contingent the bodily marks of sex, an outline of spiritual transcendence that is deliberately universalistic, and a tantalizing glimpse of how she has worked with and through her gendered bodily presence to attain a socially significant emancipation from those normative limits. The framing within the story, which is sympathetic to her and leaves her unambiguously victorious, prompts certain considerations about the potential for this story about gendered experience to contribute to contemporary discussions about the role of gender in bodily identity.