SOURCE: Hess, Linda. “Rejecting Sita: Indian Responses to the Ideal Man's Cruel Treatment of His Ideal Wife.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 1 (March 1999): 1-32.

In the following entry, Hess discusses the sexual politics of male domination and female subjugation as expressed in the Ramayana, exploring responses to those doctrines.

This article could also be called “The Mysteries of Normative Texts.” Who decides what's normative? Who decide who's normal? Who benefits and who suffers from declarations of normality? In the inevitable flow of time and change, how do people manage both to cling to norms and to alter them?

Pardon me if I sound monolithic, but for 2,000 years the god-king Rama¹ has been way in front of all contenders for the title of Official Ideal Man in Hindu India. In the opening lines of the Sanskrit poem that is fountainhead to all later Rāmāyana...