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

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Studies concerning intimate relations between the colonizers and colonized have flourished for a long time now. Such historiography focuses on the black-white paradigm of racial interactions and intimacies. There is still a wide field to be explored about intimate relations amongst the colonized subjects. It is imperative to deepen the studies on how intimate relations amongst the colonized subjects evolved, how the colonial administration regulated them and in the process it allows us to deepen our understanding of how the colonial legacies of controlling intimate relations continue in legal/social structures in many post-colonial societies. Domestic spaces, intimacies of everyday life and colonized bodies were the sites wherein subjectivity and sexuality of the colonial subjects were regulated and governed. Simultaneously, these intimate and domestic spaces, intimate relationship in everyday and performance of such intimacies created spaces and a voice for the colonized to articulate their desires, anxieties and resilience when they came to be discussed in public places. Papers in this panel proposes three sites and temporal moments, body, everyday, intimate relationships, through which both regulation and recovery (of voices) were/are, articulated in colonial and post-colonial times, wherein citizenships, sexuality, labour, health and immigration policies were debated, implemented and contested. The interdisciplinary papers ask: What is the relationship between body and everyday with sexual citizenship? How were intimate spaces related to colonial regulation of labour, health and sexuality? What forms of governance and regulatory legal forms (dis)continue from colonial to post-colonial states in regulating the intimate relationships of colonial and post-colonial subjects? What do these tell about the regulation of intimacy, body in relation to voice, resilience, governance, sexuality and citizenship from colonial time to present times?

Area of Study

• Interarea-Border Crossing

Session Organizer

• Arunima Datta, National University of Singapore

Chair

• Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii, Manoa

Individual Presentations

• Discomforting the State: Minority Women’s Labor, Reproductive Capacity and Sexuality in Postwar Sri Lanka - Mythri Jegathesan, Santa Clara University

• Regulating Intimacies and Sexual Citizenships: A Comparative Perspective between Colonial and Immigration Courts Cases on Sri Lankan Tamil Marriages - Sidharthan Maunaguru, National University of Singapore

• Entangled Colonial Histories: Colonial Law and "Coolie" Intimacies in Twentieth-Century Malaya and Ceylon - Arunima Datta, National University of Singapore

• Importing Gendered Legal Reasoning from England: Wife Murders in Early Colonial India, 1805-1857 - Daniel J.R. Grey, Plymouth University

Discussant

• Barbara Watson Andaya, University of Hawaii, Manoa