When the World Becomes Female: Possibilities of a South Indian Goddess (Indiana University Press, 2013). Documents and analyzes festival, ritual, and narrative traditions of the South Indian village goddess (gramadevata) Gangamma, traditions in which gender at both cosmological and human levels is performed and debated. During Gangamma’s annual hot-season festival, for one week, ultimate reality is imagined and experienced as female. The streets of Tirupati are filled with the goddess (through human bodies) visiting homes in the old city; men who have taken female guises (breasts, braids, saris, ornaments); and women who create the goddess in their kitchens, greet her forms that perambulate the streets, and/or take offerings to her temple. The ritual and narrative worlds of Gangamma and personal narratives of those who serve her introduce possibilities of gender that are characteristic of South Indian artisan/trader castes, possibilities that are being threatened both by processes of brahminization of some Gangamma temples and the growth of middle-class aesthetics and gender and sexual mores.