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Description
Highlighting the experiences of transgender women, this book presents an ethnographic study of the Aravan Festival in India.
Also called the Koovagam festival, the Aravan Festival is an 18-day annual festival held in honor of the mythological sacrifice of Aravan and his symbolic marriage. The festival is held in the rural village of Koovagam and brings together thousands of trans women from across the country. This book delves into the performative, corporeal, and sensorial dimensions of the festival, bringing forth its multifaceted nature as well as its aesthetics.
The author reveals how the festival dynamically blends rupture and continuity, challenging fixed cultural narratives. They illustrate how each sense assumes a distinct role in the festival, either through its presence or its regulation. The book also examines the multiple processes of making (building) and unmaking (dismantling) the deity's body, the trans women's experiments with embodiment, and the tension between the devotees' desire for a perfect, unified body and the disruption of that ideal through rituals like the uyir palayanam (life transfer) of the deity. These rituals challenge corporeal unity, displaying the imaginative possibilities of the body.
Through this rich sensory and performative exploration, the book uncovers the festival's transformative potential, offering a "disruptive aesthetics" that resists singular interpretations and opens up new possibilities for understanding embodiment, sensory engagement, and cultural expression.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
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Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
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Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration
Introduction. Framing the Aravan Festival and Its Worlds
1. Creative and Imaginative Making of the Festival: Koothu, Kathai, and Performance
2. Sensorial Life of the Festival: Various Senses at Play
3. Festival as Coming into Presence: Different Meanings and Subjectivities
4. Navigating Fertility, Life, and Death through Myths and Rituals
5. The Corporeality of the Festival: Aravan, Aravanis, and the Making and Unmaking of the Body
Conclusion. Aesthetics of the Festival: Multiplicity, Ambivalence, and the Distribution of the Sensible
Glossary
References
Index
Product details
| Published | 29 Apr 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 208 |
| ISBN | 9798216390657 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Illustrations | 3 bw photos |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
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