Creon vs. Antigone or Male vs. Female?

In Sophocles Antigone, the title character's gender has profound effects on the meaning of her actions. Creon himself says that the need to defeat her is all the more pressing because since she is a woman her rebellion upsets gender roles and hierarchy. By refusing to be passive, she overturns one of the fundamental rules of her culture. Women were subjugated and supposed to be silent spectators to the world around them as men's, such as Creon's, search for power fuels there desire to put women down to lessen the possibility of a threat. Antigone is a woman who firmly believed in humanly…