Gender Identities and Cultural Transformation in Ian Mcewan’s the Cement Garden

Abstract

This paper discusses about how gender identities are social formations, gendered roles, and specific codes that emerge as a result of social and cultural hegemony institutionalising and interpellation an individual’s psyche in Ian McEwan The Cement Garden. It also looks at how the siblings in The Cement Garden's family deal with the changing relationships and views of their nuclear family, as well as how cultural changes affect their sense of who they are as men and women. This novel focuses on the disintegration of a sudden nuclear family structure, as well as the ephemeral Aspects of sex identities and the strange sexual behavior of abruptly abandoned kids who, after their parents die, become attracted to other family members. To protect their mother’s body from the disciplinary society, Julie, Jack, Sue and Tom all make the decision to bury it in the cellar. Mentions of the binary distinctions between masculinities and femininities are frequent. As a result, each member of this androgynous society voluntarily tends to desire self-repression as a result of familial mechanisms of subject-formation rather than being able to threaten the territorialization or maintenance of the power structures of patriarchy.