Problematizing Kinship and Spatial Division: A Reading of Sophocles’s The Theban Plays

Abstract

Kinship involves relationships that are primarily based on consanguinity and biological affinity. Family is an important site for an individual’s exposure to the domestic as well as to the public space. It symbolizes the normative system where sexual regulation, spatial division for men and women, and biological orientation are naturalized in the sociocultural context. In the kinship network one can trace kin belonging to both the ‘order of nature’ as opposed to the ‘order of law’. The covert distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ corresponds to the level of gendered configuration of spaces, for example, ‘oikos’ (private sphere) and ‘polis’ (public sphere) in the Greek socio-political and cultural context. Taking Sophocles’s The Theban Plays as the case study, this proposed paper aims to explore the assumptive binaries in the normative kinship system vis-à-vis the hierarchical configuration of spaces. The paper would also examine how women pose a challenge to the discursive ‘constructs’ and problematize the spatial bifurcation by transcending the gender specific roles.