Labor on gender

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

Bibliographic Data

ID12459115
AuthorsThemal Ellawala (0000-0001-5948-4167, University of Illinois Chicago, corresponding author)
Year2025
Pages1-22
Publication date2025-06-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Lesbian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1089-4160 • E-ISSN: 1540-3548
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10894160.2025.2515747
PMID40497703
OpenAlexW4411210872
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited29

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