Breaking Gender Barriers: Postmodern Insights from Sidhwa's Works

This study explores Bapsi Sidhwa’s The Pakistani Bride (1990) and Ice-Candy Man (1998) through Judith Butler’s perspective of gender performativity. Bapsi Sidhwa, an award-winning Anglophone Pakistani novelist, is considered a pioneer of the English novel in Pakistan. The dissertation argues that Sidhwa's works resist gender stereotyping and cultural norms related to binary sexuality. Pakistani Bride and Ice-Candy Man challenge socio-cultural gender constructs by depicting characters whose gender identities are shaped by their varied performances rather than their sexual categorization. These characters exhibit multiple shades of gender identities through their actions, suggesting that gender is a fluid and indeterminate entity, unrelated to biological sex.Furthermore, the study contends that i gender is not something we are born with, and not something we have, but something we do – something we perform (Butler, 1990). The socio-cultural taken-for-granted gender construction causes an unequal representation of it in all walks of life that is disrupted through the performativity of various characters.