Jaded jezebels, chainsmokers, gypsies, and ninjas: Criminality and the refurbishment of lesbian identity and gender non-conforming identities in Sri Lankan newspaper narratives

Abstract

This essay focuses on how Sinhala and English newspapers in Sri Lanka interpret and refurbish lesbian identity and gender non-conforming identities using tropes of criminality. My premise is that, despite the existence of British colonial laws against ‘sodomy’ and ‘impersonation’ in the Sri Lankan Penal Code, law does not offer a clear definition or interpretation that can act as an organizing narrative for these identities. Although newspapers cite these laws, criminality has to be narrated, and the modes of narration produce instabilities around, and re-articulations of, those identities. Thus, the essay asks how Sri Lankan newspapers discursively construct the criminality of lesbian and gender non-conforming identities. I survey print and online newspaper articles dating from August 1999 to August 2020, critiquing attempts to make these identities explicable by way of strict legal framings of criminality. I draw out four tropes, “Jaded Jezebels,” “Chainsmokers,” “Gypsies,” and “Ninjas,” arguing that they are proxy categories for lesbian and gender non-confirming identities and that they reflect how the meanings of criminality are discursively produced and rendered unstable across frames of reference such as religious orthodoxy, cultural conformity, heteropatriarchal norms, and modernity vs. tradition. I highlight moments of narrative instability, including the above bizarre tropes, forced discursive connections, misfiring formulations, and rag-tag collections of meanings. The article concludes that the question of whether lesbian identity and gender non-conforming identities are obsolete is inflected, in Sri Lankan newspaper narratives, by how they are refurbished via proxy categories with their own contingent meanings and frames of reference.