ShodhPatra: International Journal of Science and Humanities

Fluid Identities: Queer Performativities in Dance Like a Man and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai

Queer study is an interdisciplinary field of study. As an integral part of Gender Studies,it deals with some key concepts like heteronormativity, performativity, fluidity of identity and subversion. We have a glimpse of this analytical perspective in the works of renowned authors like Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Virginia Woolf, Adriene Rich ,Oscar Wilde and James Baldwin and so on. Through my paper I intend to show some prevailing complicated aspects of our society which are considered as social taboos. To analyze my strand on these specific issues , I have included in my study two specific works: Dance Like a Man and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai. When we are talking about the Modern theater we have to discuss Mahesh Dattani who needs no introduction. The modern society in Mahesh Dattani's plays is the setting. He has researched themes related to social exclusion, gender inequality, fundamentalism, and the psychological effects of the terrible HIV/AIDS epidemic.He is bold and unafraid to convey novel issues such as men and women's representation of their sex preferences, which was taboo in Indian society until recently. Readers feel empathetic and sympathetic towards him for his accurate depiction of human nature. Dance Like a Man brings us to a specific world where the protagonist Jairaj is a victim of the gender binary of patriarchal society. In On a Muggy Night in Mumbai we see the plight of Kamlesh and Prakash to accept each other as life partners.In this paper, through textual analysis I will examine how Dattani's plays depict queer people and argue that gender roles are socially rather than physiologically determined. Dance Like a Man and On a Muggy Night in Mumbai, two of Dattani's plays, have been chosen for this purpose.