Copyright © 2026 Authors retain the copyright of this article. This article is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

@article{210503,
        author = {Hariharan R and Dr. R. Kannan},
        title = {No Act Will Do: Precarious Manhood and the Limits of Restoration in Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman},
        journal = {International Journal of Innovative Research in Technology},
        year = {2026},
        volume = {13},
        number = {6},
        pages = {1255-1261},
        issn = {2349-6002},
        url = {https://ijirt.org/article?manuscript=210503},
        abstract = {Perumal Murugan's One Part Woman (2010; trans. 2013) is usually read as the story of a childless couple worn down by a pronatalist village. This paper reads Kali, the husband, through Precarious Manhood Theory (PMT), the social-psychological account developed by Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson, which holds that manhood is a status that must be earned, can be lost, and is restored through public action. The novel confirms the first two propositions with unusual precision. Fatherhood is the test, and the village is the examiner. It breaks the third. Every route to restoration the theory anticipates, from confrontation and withdrawal to drink, a second marriage and adoption, is either closed off or made useless, because no act can prove what the village wants proved. The family's remedy, the fourteenth night of the chariot festival, secures the lineage only by giving up Kali's claim to manhood. The paper argues that the novel stages a case PMT does not model: a manhood that is precarious and also beyond repair. It also argues that the novel unsettles the theory's central asymmetry, since in this lineage-bound world Ponna's womanhood is put at risk as surely as Kali's manhood.},
        keywords = {precarious manhood, masculinity, infertility, lineage, Perumal Murugan, Tamil fiction in translation},
        month = {November},
        }