The mother of Jesus as analytical category in John's Gospel

By relating male and female characters in John, new dimensions are added to gender as an important aspect of characterization. Gender is a social construct, and as related to a literary character it is established by the roles attributed to a character within the narrative and by the context from which it is drawn. Besides that, gender is constructed by the relation of a character to other characters, male and female of the same text and of other texts. My intention with this article is to use the Johannine dualistic principle to pair "the mother of Jesus" and the "father of Jesus" and to indicate the consequences for other character pairings in John.