Sex, labor, and the state of exception: On the gendered division of labor in Sri Lanka

Abstract

This presentation explores the gendered division of labor in Sri Lanka, which has long been structured by post/colonial and nationalist logics. I center a specific type of labor – sex work – to interrogate conventional wisdom on this gender division – that the public sphere is the domain of men and that women are relegated to the private. Based on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted with queer, trans women, and cis women sex workers, I suggest that the principle of the exception (Agamben 2005), rather than the public-private split, is what structures the gendered division of labor. Refracting gendered labor in this way allows me to connect labor regimes to the perpetual state of exception that defines governmentality in Sri Lanka, so illustrating the multiple regimes of colonial and nationalist regulation that structure gender-sexual life. This analysis emerges out of methodological interventions into the politics of feminist and queer knowledge production in Sri Lanka. I use methods such as co-speculation, which entails co-creating anti-positivist knowledge with my interlocutors. I also intervene in a foundational debate in queer studies (Eng and Puar 2020)
, deploying both subject-centric critique (which centers the queer and trans figure) as well as subjectless critique (as queerness, and gender-sexuality, are logics that extend beyond the queer/trans figure) as a dual analytical mode I argue is what is required of queer studies in the Sri Lankan post-colonial theatre.