Deifying, Demonizing, and Diagnosing Female Anger: An Affective Analysis of Yakshi, Bhadrakali, and Nagavalli in Kerala's Cultural Narrative

International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 147 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 Deifying, Demonizing, and Diagnosing Female Anger: An Affective Analysis of Yakshi, Bhadrakali, and Nagavalli in Kerala’s Cultural Narrative MS Maheswari PG Student, Mar Ivanios College ABSTRACT Female anger is among the profoundly regulated emotional expressions in a patriarchal society. Depending on the context in which it is expressed, feminine rage is either sanctified, demonized, or medicalized, while its counterpart in male anger is normalized as rational and heroic. This paper is an investigation of the affective containment of female anger, focusing on the cultural, religious, and cinematic representations of three prominent figures in Kerala‘s narrative landscape: Yakshi, Bhadrakali, and Nagavalli. The paper has the theoretical backing of affect theory, feminist criticism, and biopolitical frameworks, and is structured as a study concerned with how these figures have been subjected to modes of deification, demonization, and diagnosis as a method of neutralizing the threat of feminine rage. The paper critiques the patriarchal mechanisms that reframe women‘s wrath into aesthetic, spiritual, or pathological forms, along with interdisciplinary close readings of folklore, ritual performance, and popular media, ultimately rendering their anger unintelligible and non-threatening. The paper is a feminist intervention to reclaim female rage as a legitimate response to injustice and an obstreperous force capable of unsettling dominant structures of power. 1. Introduction ―Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story.‖ -Rebecca Solnit The emotional spectrum of women has always been policed throughout history. Narrations, rituals, and representations persistently remind women that it is culturally illegible and International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 148 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 monstrous. Women are expected to be domesticated and silenced. However, an Affective analysis exposes how it is described as a threat to social structures, as it reveals the flaws in the systems that claim submission from their female subjects. Affect theory investigates how the bodies, which are both individual and collective, transmit and respond to the intense non-linguistic, precognitive expression. It is often defined as a psychological and personal response that is categorized as bodily and personal. It is concerned with an ingrained force that moves between bodies and generates reactions and constructions of feelings and societal meanings. (Massumi 1; Brennan 5). Affect theory originates from the work of Baruch Spinoza and got its renaissance in the late 20th and 21st centuries through the works of critics such as Silvan Tomkins, Brian Massumi, Teresa Brennan, Sara Ahmed, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. These theorists are responsible for the expansion of Affect into an interdisciplinary theory that spans across cultural studies, feminist theory, psychology, politics, and philosophy. According to Massumi, affect is ―a pre-conscious experience of intensity‖ that shapes one‘s behaviour before it can be cognitively processed or encoded by society (Massumi 30). In her seminal work The Transmission of Affect, Teresa Brennan substantiates that affect is never restrained to an individual but rather circulated between bodies, which explains that emotions like fear, rage, or desire are not just internal, cognitive experiences, but forces that are in relation to the governance of context (Brennan 2). Sara Ahmed introduces affective economies, under the suggestion that emotions ―stick‖ to some bodies than it does to others, contouring how subjects are understood in social settings (Ahmed 11). This is the key concept in understanding how female anger is always ciphered as monstrous, while male anger is valorized and naturalized. This explains how each expression is attached to multifaceted gendered and cultural meanings. Female anger is never treated rationally or just in mythology, cinema, folklore, or in religious practices. An angry woman is either a demon or she is made into a deity. She is demonized as in the cases of mortal women like Yakshi or Nagavalli or deified like the goddess Bhadrakali. In both cases, the woman is never allowed to lead a normal, mortal life. She has to assimilate International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 149 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 into the roles presented before her: either a demon or a deity, she is denied a subjective narrative or a voice. Focusing on the South-Asian literary discourse, Affect Theory, and gender studies in a postcultural scenario, this paper tries to position the feminine rage as a site of bio-political control and affective resistance, and not a transgression or a pathology that needs to be diagnosed and cured. This paper asks why a woman needs to be either a ghost or a goddess to have her wrath acknowledged. This study is an interrogation of the various mechanisms of culture that operate to repress female wrath and its expression in mortal women. It is not given currency unless it is either demonized or deified. Examining South-Asian contexts, figures such as Yakshi, Nagavalli, and Bhadrakali, this research brings to light narratives that discipline the female affect, transfiguring acts of resistance into monstrosity. This is the theoretical backing for applying the interdisciplinary theory of Affect into this study, within such a non-Western tradition. Insights from other fields, such as gender studies, psychology, and post-structural feminism, are taken into this interdisciplinary study to make the argument more comprehensive. The cultural validation of male emotion and demonization of female emotion shows us how, for women, even a primary human emotion such as rage has to be sanctioned by society. Her anger should be ritually redirected, spiritually contained, and clinically cured to be legible to all. 1.1 Divine Rage and Disciplined Fury — Bhadrakali as a Sacred Archetype of Deified and Sanctioned Female Wrath The goddess Bhadrakali is an embodiment of the ―righteous‖ rage. This anger is never monstrous since it is a perfect fit for the structures of patriarchy and is sanctioned divinely. This anger is celebrated through the rituals and performances like Theyyam and Mudiyettu. But even for this to be sanctioned, the goddess‘s fury must be mediated by the cabinet of the patriarchythe priests, dancers, and the scripts. Her wrath is only acceptable since it is symbolic and made to fit into the script of spirituality. It is aligned with the restoration of cosmic righteousness (Dharma), offering no challenge to the existing social systems. International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 150 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 Affect Theory enables us to understand this distinction, of how ―emotions are perceived as pre-conscious intensities that are acceptable when they are shaped by the dominant ideologies‖ (Massumi 28). The wrath of the goddess is not that of a mortal woman‘sit is the divine wrath, separated from the subjective mortal world. This aestheticized power is never political. The loud voice dedicated to her is heard, but it is scripted. Thus, even when it is divine, the fate of the female wrath becomes controlled and consumed. Bhadrakali is one of the most revered female figures in Kerala‘s ritualistic landscapes. She is celebrated through performative traditions like Theyyam, Mudiyettu, and Poothan-Thira. Bhadrakali is an avatar of Durga, and it is her warrior aspect that is often projected to Bhadrakali. The visualization is often in an iconography that is loud, dreadful, blood-stained, and infuriated -and these are the traits that are demonized in mortal women. This divine wrath that is seen in her battles with Asuras, like Darika or Mahishasura, is revered and celebrated as a cosmic necessity, which has an allegorical force of dharmic correction that purifies the cosmic order spiritually. Yet, this expression of female emotion, despite being made sacred, is not free or autonomous. Bhadrakali‘s fury is shaped, permitted, and ultimately composed and disciplined to be contained within the patriarchal, ritualistic frameworks. Bhadrakali has an effectively charged economy around her that permits female wrath, but only when it is coded divinely and fluted towards the preservation of social and planetary order. Her anger is rendered meaningful because it is conducive and instrumental, and never personalit is a deity performing cosmic justice and never the rage of a violated mortal woman. Bhadrakali‘s anger is made legible and even respected, only because it is inculcated into the ritual and made predictable. It is bounded and never out of patriarchal control. Sara Ahmed argues that emotions are ―shaped by contact with others‖ and never exist in a vacuum (Ahmed 11). Bhadrakali‘s rage, expressed in the traditional ritualistic context, is always interpreted as regenerative and seldom disruptive. It is in perfect alignment with the cultural codes and expectations of patriarchy. A similar emotional intensity in mortal women, such as Yakshi or Nagavalli, is re-framed as hysteria or monstrosity. International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 151 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 In the cultural scenario of Bhadrakali performances, the divine feminine rage is usually exteriorized by male actors. During the performance of Theyyam, the performer, usually a male member, encounters hours of make-up and preparation to become the vessel to contain the Devi (goddess). This transformation includes elaborate costumes, makeup, getting into a heightened sensibility, as well as going through purification rituals. In the moment of performance, the performer trans-inducts himself to the goddesstemporarily. At the culmination of the ritual, Bhadrakali‘s anger is dismissed ritually, and the performer returns to being mortal. The whole process of possession and depersonalization acknowledges how even the divine female anger is contemplated through spaces that are male-centered, making the event a mediated one rather than an uninterrupted mode of being. Foucault‘s notion of biopower is deeply relevant in this scenario, which substantiates the control the society or state exercises over the individuals, their rituals, and discourses. The Bhadrakali performance is not only religious, but a biopolitical act, and this allows the society to temporarily release and make the containment of the feminine rage, thus avoiding the possible ‗threat‘, enabling the channel of the feminine anger through acceptable directions. These rituals are often operated through spaces that are pronounced by the hierarchies of gender and caste. The performer is elevated to a divine status, and the goddess is worshiped, but the societal connotations of her wrath are enacted symbolically and then attenuated. The rage of the goddess is aesthetized, but never politicized. The treatment of divine rage and mortal rage is extremely different. Bhadrakali, in her full rage, is revered, adorned, and acclaimedwhile the wrath of a mortal woman who expresses a similar anger against the injustice is treated as contentious. While a Yakshi murders, Bhadrakali blesses. Nagavalli should be exorcised, while Bhadrakali is channelized. The mortal female body is the site of anxiety, and the divine is rendered safe through abstraction. The emotional possibilities of mortal women are affected by this regulation of emotions. As Ahmed notes, women begin to regulate their emotions based on cultural acceptability, and their anger is made to stick to different bodies differently. According to the cultural script, if a woman should be angry, she should either be divine or restrained. The expression of International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 152 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 emotional intensity of any form that lies outside the rituals of religion is painted as a dysfunction. The sacred anger is a paradox within the patriarchy; the female anger is revered only when it is abstract and carefully stylized. It is under the condition that it must never resemble the scarred, personal anger that carries with it a revolutionary potential. The patriarchal system offers respect to the female anger in a divine setting, but it is never liberated. 1.2 From Femme Fatale to Formulated Femininity — Yakshi and Nagavalli as Cultural Sites of Affective Containment Emotions in their truest configuration, transcend the realm of personal experiences; they are social forces that disseminate through cultures, forming collective meaning and bulwark power structures (Ahmed 4). This stands peculiarly true for the portrayal of female anger, which is always given the light of excess, danger, and undesirability. When wrath is voiced by a mortal woman, the cultural tendency is to demonize it and cast it as irrational and supernatural. The rage is recast with a supernatural monstrosityrepresented at its finest by characters like Nagavalli in the movie Manichithrathazhu and Yakshi in Kerala‘s folklore narratives. In both characters, one sees a greater affective economy (Ahmed 12), where the fury of a mortal woman is culturally painted as a power to be feared and repelled. This chapter reconnoiters the demonization of the anger of mortal women and how it emancipates and sustains patriarchal control of female agency. “The typical Yakshi tale of medieval Kerala begins with a traveller, usually a Namboothiri or a Brahmin man, on his way to a late-night Kathakali performance in a far-away temple or a relative’s place, meeting a beautiful woman on the deserted pathway at night. The woman wants to have a paan(murukku)and wants to know if the Namboothiri might have some lime with him to spread on the betel leaves she is having with her. The Namboothiri, usually presented in these stories as a lascivious man ready for all kinds of sexual adventures, wastes no time in offering the lime. The woman who acts coy and bashful is impressed by the Namboothiri and wonders if he would like to visit her home, which is quite nearby. The Namboothiri is overjoyed to accompany the beautiful woman to her home. This is where the tale changes its tenor as the young woman and the woman’s home both transform. The International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 153 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 woman changes into a Yakshi, a female monster whose fangs bite into the Namboothiri’s neck. The woman’s home changes into a palm tree, the Yakshi’s haunt. The Yakshi doesn’t just drink the Namboothiri’s blood; she eats him alive and leaves his hair and teeth under her palm tree for the next sojourner to learn a wise lesson about the dangers of night travel.” (Meenu-329) According to the oral traditions of Kerala, Yakshi is often a woman betrayed, abandoned, and slain by a man, but seldom do we see her victimization as the emphasis of her story. The fury of the betrayed woman is culturally coded into a supernatural horror, cultivating hate, disgust, and fear for her (Devika-88). This terror spreads through communities each time the story of this ―monstrous-feminine‖ is repeated. Sara Ahmed explains that affect adheres to certain bodies through recurrent cultural representations (Ahmed-89). The story of Yakshi convinces the audience that female fury at injustice is an illogical and unnatural reaction and that an angry woman‘s body becomes a place for fear and abjection, making it a threat to the patriarchal social order. An angry woman becomes unmanageable and inconvenient, making it impossible for the ‗regulators‘ to control her and her agency to express. Along with being an embodiment of horror, Yakshi also becomes a symbol of sexual allure. The folklore introduces her initially as a seductress who captivates her prey with her charm, enticing men to her domain. This hypersexualization of Yakshi resonates with Barbara Creed‘s concept of the Monstrous-Feminine, which postulates how women‘s anger is never considered as a reaction, but rather as an excessive, intrinsically sexually linked phenomenon that necessitates annihilation (Creed-5). Yakshi is Kerala‘s own femme fatale, transcending the act of being a ghost. Yakshi is the perfect amalgamation of desire, danger, and death. Yakshi seduces, destroys, and consumes men, making her the eastern counterpart of the femme fatale that we see in Western noir movies and literature. Yakshi‘s otherworldly charm is, however, related to her rage and supernatural atrocity, in contrast to the conspicuous femme fatales of Hollywood. Yakshi is more than just a beguiling predator; she is the epitome of a betrayed, enraged woman, whose wrath manifests through her seduction of unfaithful men. She is a culture-specific variation of International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 154 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 the femme fatale archetype, a culturally distinct version, making her Kerala‘s own vamp. Her anger and beauty are seen as excesses that need to be feared and restrained. Desire becomes a portal to death in traditional Yakshi stories; her sexual autonomy makes her inexorable since she diverts from traditional femininity. Two key lessons are taught by the Yakshi story by making female anger indivisible from fatal seduction: 1. To men: Women‘s sexuality carries an irresistible allure but an inherent risk that can be perilous. 2. To women: The display of desire and anger in public spheres can lead to monstrous perceptions. Nagavalli‘s character in Manichitrathazhu (1993) is the perfect embodiment of the patriarchal management of the female rage, trauma, and retaliation. The affective containment and biopolitical management in popular Indian cinema celebrated this metamorphosis of punishing the woman who dared to express her desires freely. Nagavalli‘s transformation from a dancer who was wronged for stepping outside the patriarchal control to a possessed figure who is unstable psychologically, encapsulates how female rage is labelled pathological under the patriarchal framework. Modern power, according to Foucault, is ―a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations‖ (Foucault 137). This mode of coercion and control is much more powerful and difficult to overcome since it does not operate via modes of physical violence, but rather through modes of regulation and normalization, and according to Foucault, it is done through institutions such as psychiatry, medicine, and religion. The political aspect of Nagavalli‘s posthumous presence is not analysed from the point of view of a woman who was subject to caste and gender oppression, but as a malevolent power trying to cause harm to the protagonist Ganga. As Anne Balsamo‘s reading of The Handmaid’s Tale, where the women of Gilead are reduced to bodies that are effectively controlled and regulated through the patriarchal governance, ensuring control over female International Journal of Research (IJR) e-ISSN: 2348-6848 p-ISSN: 2348-795X Vol. 12 Issue 13 October 2025 Received: 12 October 2025 155 Revised: 25 October 2025 Accepted: 30 October 2025 Copyright  authors 2025 DOI: HTTPS://DOI.ORG/10.5281/ZENODO.17502809 bodies, Nagavalli, too, is reduced to a symptom. Like the women of Gilead are reduced to their reproductive function, Nagavalli is reduced to the ghost of a mental disorder; the intensity of her emotions is unthinkable unless she is framed as supernatural and is ultimately brought under control. The affective containment gives patriarchy the bio-power that is required to control and regulate women‘s bodies. Here, Nagavalli‘s rage is culturally and politically transformed into mental illness. Emotions like female rage become ―culturally overburdened‖ (Ahmed 44), which are interpreted not as evidence of injustice that happened to the woman but as a symbol of deviance from the prescribed norm. The film‘s resolution announces the cure of Ganga, free of Nagavalli‘s influence, which ultimately describes how it was not the original injustice that stood as the problem, but the persistence of excessive female anger. Emotional and psychic repression does not require coercive measures since it is internalized with a precise alignment to Foucault‘s analogy of modern power and discipline. Nagavalli‘s anger is made apolitical and pathological; it originates in the structural oppression, but later is absorbed into a psychiatric discourse. The movie thus enacts the affective social control that ensures that the audience fears the consequences of female expression of emotions, with a simultaneous legitimization of the institutions that manage it. Virginia Woolf, in her seminal work A Room of One's Own, mentions the economic and psychological freedom women require to be expressive and have agency on their own. This can be considered a recurring and spatial motif in literature and cinema. Woolf says this room conveys, as a metaphor, psychological and economic freedom that a woman requires to be free. While Woolf‘s idea of an enclosed space is an emancipating enclosure for selfexpression, in some narratives, this enclosure becomes a space for imprisonment and silencing. The room becomes a site of social control where women‘s emotions and desires are effectively controlled, labelling them pathological and calling it madness. As Foucault theorizes in The Will To Knowledge, modern norms of control project a very positive, confirming mode of power that has a very comprehensive, controlling nature. The room thus becomes the perfect instrument for a biopolitical manipulation that claims to offer privacy but functions as a disciplinary mechanism.