Dancing Against Patriarchy: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Crisis of Manhood in Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man

Vivekanandhan N.K; Sakthivel P

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.85241

Dancing Against Patriarchy: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Crisis of Manhood in Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man

Author(s)	Dr. Vivekanandhan N.K, Dr. Sakthivel P
Country	India
Abstract	Criticism of Indian English drama has tended to read patriarchy chiefly as a system that benefits men at women's expense. That framing has left one thing underexamined: the same ideology also disciplines and marginalizes men who do not conform to its own image of manhood. Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man (1989) is a useful case because its central figure, Jairaj Parekh, is not a beneficiary of patriarchy but its casualty — a Bharatanatyam dancer whose vocation puts him at odds with his father Amritlal's narrow idea of what a man should be. Using R. W. Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, Judith Butler's account of gender as performance, and Michael Kimmel's work on masculinity as something men must continually prove to other men, this paper offers a close reading of the play, drawing its evidence directly from the text as printed in Collected Plays (2000). The argument is that Jairaj's breakdown is not a matter of personal weakness; it is what happens when a culture insists that manhood equals authority, income, and emotional control, and then refuses to recognize an alternative. Read this way, dance in the play becomes less a hobby than a form of resistance, and Dattani's target turns out to be patriarchal masculinity itself, not only the women it subordinates.
Keywords	Mahesh Dattani, Dance Like a Man, hegemonic masculinity, gender performativity, patriarchy, Indian English drama
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-08-07
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.85241

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Dancing Against Patriarchy: Hegemonic Masculinity and the Crisis of Manhood in Mahesh Dattani's Dance Like a Man

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