The Mutilated Male: Polarization of the Genders in Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out and in Current Dramatizations of the Incel Community

This paper examines Manjula Padmanabhan’s Lights Out (1984) with a focus on the theatrical representation of the fe/male characters. This drama deals with a horrific ongoing sexual assault under the watching eyes of an entire apartment block of upper-middle-class Indians. This tense and unsettling work highlights the juxtaposition of male and female attitudes to a sexual crime. While the females of the play recoil in horror, the males attempt to explain away the significance of what is happening and ignore the responsibility of normal human beings to come to the aid of a victim and stop a revolting crime from being committed. The noises of the incident in progress, and even the anticipation of the noises, become uncomfortable intruders in the lives of the apartment dwellers. Almost forty years later new plays and television dramas such as The Last Incel (2024) by Jamie Sykes and the British television crime series Adolescence (2025) have once again brought to the forefront the polarization of male and female attitudes when faced with similar situations. This paper further seeks to delineate Padmanabhan’s conflicting male and female reactions in Lights Out and tries to illuminate the paths which have led to what can be seen as a verbal and sometimes even physical war against the female sex by the Incel and so-called “Manosphere” communities through current dramatizations. This paper continues to explore how the ancient Hindu tale of the Disrobing of Draupadi in the epic Mahabharata influences the differences in how Indian females and males react to gender-based violence. This dramatic incident acts as a lens to focus light on how the moral stance and defiance of a woman supposedly stripped and humiliated before the male gaze actually unveils the moral nakedness of the onlooking males.