Labor on gender

Butch lesbians and trans men in a Sri Lankan Economic Processing Zone

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12459115
AutoresThemal Ellawala (0000-0001-5948-4167, University of Illinois Chicago, autor de correspondencia)
Año2025
Páginas1-22
Fecha de publicación2025-06-11
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Lesbian Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1089-4160 • E-ISSN: 1540-3548
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10894160.2025.2515747
PMID40497703
OpenAlexW4411210872
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas29

This paper queries an anxiety that marks the nexus of queerness and transness in Sri Lanka, concerning the slippage between the butch lesbian and the trans man. Taking this anxiety seriously, I explore the phenomenon of butch women and trans men who seek employment at the garment factories in the Katunayake Economic Processing Zone to explore a range of gendered desires of masculinity, inspiring category confusions between lesbianism and trans masculinity in the process. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2022-2024 to ask: what is it about the factory that allows for such complex negotiations of gender and sexuality amidst the paranoid disciplining of bodies into productivity? How does centering labor shift our understandings of butchness, trans masculinity, and the performance of gender? This essay stages a conversation with lesbian studies and trans studies, specifically the scholarship on the butch-FTM border wars , by positing labor as a crucial analytic that reflects and refracts both field formations. I suggest that situating the butch and trans male figures within critical political economy foregrounds how labor conditions inflect, incentivize, and demand specific gender performances, which propels the laboring gender variant figure to negotiate their gender across a butch-trans masc continuum in ways that are plural, recursive, and erratic. I argue that, rather than grounds for war, the relationship between butchness and trans masculinity denotes the imbrications of labor and gender, and capitalist exploitation and gender (un)freedom

Lesbian · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Psychology · Sex work and related issues