From Supererogation To Resistance: The Choice of Sexual Role Between Marginalised and Westernised Women in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand

Abstract

Sex is an antiquated sociocultural construct that posits men as dominant and women as submissive. This paper introspects how the sex culture imposes the traditional patriarchal taboo on women to satisfy men’s carnal cravings, as it interrogates whether women internalize self-objectification due to cultural lattice. Are sex and gender conceptualized as two separate entities? Sociocultural and historical context may accentuate or downplay gender hierarchies in sexuality, inducing biological and elemental differences through which cultures craft their definitions and interpretations of gender roles in sexual practices. Substantiating the female body as an agent, the paper scrutinizes the cross-cultural female subservience and sexual supererogation through the dual protagonists in the novel The Other Hand by Chris Cleave. It offers an understanding of how the female body is a site upon which tension lies between the sexual experiences of women and the predefined sociocultural entanglements that condition and shape women. The paper will further capture two antithetical sociocultural frequencies through female protagonists and the multiple binaries that dominantly engulf the novel, such as man/woman and center/margin, that are intricately hegemonized by the sociocultural contexts..