Mythological And Cultural Representation Of The Third Gender In The Ancient Greek, Roman And Indian Literature On The Example Of Plato's Symposium, Ovid's Metamorphoses And Vyasa's Mahabharata
While the philosophy acknowledges the essential equality of all human beings as containers of the divine spark, the society establishes itself through a rigid binary gender classification. While the philosophy accepts the boundless possibilities within the universe, the society binds every person with duties transforming itself into a rigid heterosexual and patriarchal construct. In a world where the philosophy tends to be polymorphous (accepting all possibilities), but where society tends to be dimorphous (dividing everything as masculine or feminine) all those who do not fit into one or the other compartment has to be bunched together in the category of the unclassifiable.
In European culture gender binary is one general type of a gender system. But in some cultures like in the Indian-one gender may be organized differently: one can cross freely between male and female. Third gender individuals categorized as neither man nor woman can almost be revered in many Eastern cultures, whereas in Western culture, people who don’t conform to heteronormative ideals are often seen as sick, disordered, or insufficiently formed. But was it always the norm? This article is an atte
How to Cite