Regulating Intimacies and Sexual Citizenships: A Comparative Perspective between Colonial and Immigration Courts Cases on Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages

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

Abstract

A large Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora emerged with, among other reasons, marriage migration. The spouse, who has to migrate in order to be reunited with his/her spouse after the marriage, has to first navigate through embassies of different states and prove that their marriage is “genuine”, to be granted a spousal visa. In this paper, I will discuss how present day Western state regimes reconfigure and police notion of "Tamil marriages” and intimate relations of the couple through immigration laws and techniques of practices. Posing my arguments through particular ethnographic and immigration court cases, I will look at: how these regimes employ tactics to determine which Tamil marriage/s are considered "legal" or ‘genuine’ marriages; how the “traditions and intimacies” associated with Sri Lankan Tamil marriages are invented, and recreated through the eyes of the western states. But such process of defining and regulating the Sri Lankan marriage and tradition has a long history starting with its colonial rulers, during British rule in Sri Lanka. In the second part of my paper by drawing from particular court cases, between 1880 and 1940s dealing with Tamil marriages, I will show how Tamil customary marriages were considered “legal/proper”, and customs were crystallized through the legalization of ‘traditional marriage’ practices during the colonial period. By drawing from and comparing two different time periods and countries, I attempt to demonstrate how the unfinished past of policing and regulating “Tamil marriages and intimacies ” by the colonial regimes unfold into present day immigration laws and practices of modern western states. Finally, I show how in both time periods, for both regimes, sexual citizenships is attained and regulated through legitimizing the intimacies of their current and future citizens/subjects. (paper presenter and co-organizer of panel)

Author

• Sidharthan Maunaguru, National University of Singapore