Discomforting the State: Minority Women’s Labor, Reproductive Capacity and Sexuality in Postwar Sri Lanka

• In Event: 117. Governing Intimate Encounters in South and Southeast Asia: Body, Sexuality, Gender, Everyday Life and Colonial/Post-Colonial Law

Abstract

This paper is concerns women’s reproductive capacity and sexuality among minority women in postwar Sri Lanka and how political and development discourse about both subjects inform, intersect and challenge women’s own narratives about their bodies and labor. Based on ethnographic research conducted between 2009 and 2015, I specifically look at three moments in which women workers’ bodies. First, I examine the aftermath of the 2009 murders of two Tamil domestic laborers from Sri Lanka’s tea plantations and the way in which the media, NGOs, and politicians discussed their sexualities and bodies during plantation wage negotiations. Second, I discuss how the case of a beheaded Sri Lankan Muslim child laborer in Saudi Arabia led to further government and policy restrictions on migrant working women in Sri Lanka. Third, I present how Tamil women plantation workers who underwent tubal ligation procedures under family planning initiatives embody their experiences and desires as sterilized women and how such expressions intersect with the recognition of their labor and value on the plantations and in Sri Lanka. In each case, I am interested in how women’s reproductive capacity, sexuality, and choice were deployed as potential threats or affirmations to the Sri Lankan state and its economic standing and cohesion as a postwar majoritarian nation. My findings point to a lack of commensurability between minority women worker perceptions about their own bodies and labor and representations of their lives and labor in policy, political and development discourse in Sri Lanka.

Author

• Mythri Jegathesan, Santa Clara University