Policing Sexual Agency: Wives, Paramours, and Trans Women

This study investigates the mechanisms through which patriarchal norms police femme sexual agency through a canonical Carnatic devotional composition. The research focuses on a narrative of marital infidelity involving a husband, his wife, and his trans-femme paramour. The central research question is: How do lyrical variations in the staging of this composition reflect and negotiate the patriarchal strategy of triangulation, where the weight of a cis-man's infidelity is systematically borne by both the cisgender and the transgender femme characters?