Indeterminacies

Queer Tales of Love and Suffering

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3947182
AutoresThemal Ellawala (0000-0001-5948-4167, autor de correspondencia)
Año2023
Volumen133
Número1
Páginas48-62
Fecha de publicación2023-03-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01417789221138097
OpenAlexW4324142935
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas3
Referencias citadas23

This is a meditation on love and suffering, pleasure and pain. Despite common sense, public discourse and scholarship narrating these states as diametrically opposed, the lived experience of queer romantic love cannot be disarticulated from the social realities of loss and pain. Suturing love and suffering is the metaphysic of indeterminacy, with the unexpected and uncertain marking romantic encounters and ambitions with precarity and impermanence. Drawing from vignettes gained through an ethnography on queer erotics in Sri Lanka in 2016, I explore how queer love manifests and perishes in the most inexplicable fashion, against the backdrop of structural violence and the vagaries of intersubjective relationalities. A sensitivity to indeterminacy enables an excavation of the elsewheres that inhere to and are conjured by queer romantic love, from the entanglements that live outside of the binaries of heterosexual-homosexual to the utopic futural imaginaries that are made possible at this site. Meanwhile, the suffering engendered by indeterminacy gestures to the precarities of elsewhere, and the transient nature of queer futurity. I engage scholarship on social suffering and romantic love to demonstrate how both corpora of literature are united at the site of the Sri Lankan queer figure, and how centring indeterminacy troubles epistemic projects that seek to know love and the lover with certainty

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Indeterminacy (philosophy) · Pleasure · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Queer theory · Romance · Scholarship · Sociology · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Sex work and related issues · Sexuality, Behavior, and Technology