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.