Roadwork: Offstage with Special Drama Actresses in Tamilnadu, South India

popular theater genre known as "Special Drama."' The obligatory opening comedy scene of these live performance events always begins with a young woman dancing in the middle of a road, a fantastic suspension of Tamil norms of conduct for women. The painted canvas backdrop for this scene displays a wide, generic road stretching off vertically into the horizon. The comic enactment that unfolds rapidly develops into an exploration of illicit love. An unknown young bachelor appears on the road, and all manner of shady business unspools between the young man and woman, including lewd banter, flirtatious spats, boasts laden with sexual innuendo, coy one-upmanship, cooing love songs, and eventually, elopement. This opening scene is a dramatization, in a comedic mode, of the proverbial bad road for women. Its narrative content perpetuates and encourages a dominant association between public roads and the stigmatized reputation of actresses as public women. This essay concerns how such an association of ideas shapes Special Drama actresses' offstage lives and, in turn, how their practices "on the road" potentially refigure the terms of that dominant discourse. At the core of this essay are five fieldwork narratives. These retell specific experiences I had researching Special Drama actresses' roads. Each experience helped me to better understand actresses' actions offstage; these were episodes in which I learned, in particular, how and why actresses create private, exclusive spaces in the midst of the Tamil public sphere. Each narrative speaks of