Concerning the Paradigm of Gender and Sexuality in the Mahabharata

From the Paleolithic era to modern times, the paradigms of gender have always been a significant deliberation in human history. The Mahabharata, an ancient Sanskrit epic, is still a substantial source for understanding the political, social, cultural, and gender interactions of eastern society. For this purpose, this paper concentrates on how the epic has been characterized by a string of binary oppositions that limit the social structure to the heteronormative ideal of having a clear understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman, as well as their shared social behaviors and fixed identities. To address these complex difficulties, more purposeful interventions are needed. Queerness, as an old notion of heterosexual society, is necessary to address the problems. This primary concern links with the interpretation of how the epic represents queerness and what it tells us about the discourse about gender and sexuality. In order to examine normative and non-normative gender relations, Butler's concepts of gender difficulty, gender performative acts, and gender constitution might be useful. The paper thematically distinguishes between the subjectivity and the objectification of the characters, who exhibit a variety of queer traits that are now seen as static, inflexible, consistent, and only seen in terms of binary categories. Finally, it observes that the contemporary concept of sexuality shows a paradigm shift in attitudes toward gender behavior.