Sumangala explores how music serves as a powerful lens through which we can understand social stratification, hierarchies, and identities, particularly through the lens of gender. She explores how gender shapes musical roles and perceptions, the way music creates communities through coded messaging, and role of women and fluid identities in music history. Gender, alongside caste and race, has historically classified musicians. Music has also served as a tool for protest and resistance. The lecture critiques the historical "othering" of non-Western music and women within musical systems, where codification has been used to subordinate women based on gendered labels.