Legitimating Violences: The ‘Gay Rights’ NGO and the Disciplining of the Sri Lankan Queer Figure

Abstract

Sri Lanka has debated the decriminalization of homosexuality for several decades, but never with more vigour than in 2017, when the government considered this legislative change. This project was eventually abandoned, inspiring fierce opposition by local ‘LGBT’ non-governmental organizations (NGOs), resulting in an escalation of advocacy work in the country. This article interrogates the capacity ‘LGBT’ NGOs possess to (re)produce forms of structural violence and reify new idioms of normativity as they seek to emancipate the queer figure. The site of conflict between the state and civil society is rife with the problematics of nation and capital, for the NGO reifies ethno-nationalism and capitalist social cleavages. Meanwhile, reliance on material support from the Global North renders these organizations enmeshed in transnational neoliberal politics. In negotiating the narcissistic desires of state and global hegemonies, and the crisis of legitimacy that emerges through these encounters, NGOs demarcate a specifically interpellated figure as the normative ‘LGBT’ citizen, thereby collapsing a range of queer desires to flat, restrictive ontologies that exclude many. Using interviews, informal conversations and observations gleaned through an ethnography on genders and sexualities in Sri Lanka, this article explores the institutional politics of queer liberation in Sri Lanka, enmeshed as they are in the myriad complexities of postcolonial neoliberal modernity.