It’s illegal but it’s not, like, really illegal”

Sri Lanka’s ‘sodomy laws’, the politics of equivocation, and queer men’s sexual citizenship in The One Who Loves You So

Bibliographic Data

ID12713675
AuthorsShermal Wijewardene (University of Colombo, corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume21
Issue2
Pages171-188
Publication date2023-05-04
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSouth Asian Popular Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1474-6689 • E-ISSN: 1474-6697
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14746689.2023.2212256
OpenAlexW4379987306
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited13

This paper explores the representation of queer men’s unequal sexual citizenship in Sri Lanka in a Sri Lankan Anglophone play, focusing on its problematisation of an ambiguous ‘sodomy’ prohibition. I examine The One Who Loves You So (2019), a text in which the illegality of queer men’s offline and online intimacies is paradoxically depicted as both affirmed and open to interpretation. The textual analysis is contextualised by the Sri Lankan state’s consistent history of equivocating on who or what the country’s ‘sodomy laws’ criminalise, particularly when facing international human rights pressure. The state’s equivocation is surprisingly overlooked or dismissed as strategy in most current scholarship and activism: the trend is to think in terms of a hard state stance and a categorical criminalisation. The play lays the ground to grapple with the work done by equivocation, for instance in insidiously regulating same-sex intimacy and marking the conditional status of queer sexual citizenship in Sri Lanka. I plead for attention to the play’s intersectional approach, in particular how queer privilege/disprivilege mediates gradations of empowerment and disempowerment in an uncertain legal situation. The essay argues for moving beyond the idea of strategic evasiveness to recognising a state politics of equivocation on decriminalisation

Citizenship · Epistemology · Equivocation · Homosexuality · Human rights · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Sodomy · State (computer science · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · Law · LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy · Sex work and related issues

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