Subbu's Body as Jail: The Carceral Continuum and Abolition in Karthik Subbaraj's Dorothy

Prison studies usually begin with the penitentiary, but abolitionist scholarship argues that confinement is spread across institutions that need no bars. Karthik Subbaraj's Tamil film Dorothy (2026) is a useful test of that claim, because its drama of confinement, surveillance and punishment unfolds in a household, a gang and a road. Methods. This paper offers an interpretive close reading of the film's narrative, coded against a framework of surveillance, offence, punishment and enforcement, and read through Foucault's carceral continuum, the abolitionist writing of Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Indian scholarship on caste, masculinity and trans life. Results. The film places Subbu inside overlapping enforcers: the patriarchal household, the peer group, caste honour and gang violence. Together they work like a sentencing system without courts. Violence against the first Dorothy punishes tenderness and gender nonconformity. Karthi, sent to kill Subbu, refuses the enforcer's role and fakes his friend's death. Subbu's transition and the chosen community that follows suggest abolition as the making of new relations, not only escape. Conclusion. The film diagnoses carcerality more convincingly than it dismantles it, since its resolution rests on personal conscience and not on structural change. The reading extends prison studies into popular Tamil cinema and shows a mainstream film thinking, imperfectly, about abolition.