Resident Graduate Scholar Seminar: Themal Ellawala, Anthropology “When Ephemera Bind: On Negative & Positive Space and Queer Relationality in Sri Lanka”
November 13, 2024
2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
Download iCal FileSri Lanka experiences the worst socio-economic crisis of its postcolonial history and its trans men discuss buying strap-ons. Leftist feminists who led the major popular uprising of 2022 speak of ceaseless struggle against political crisis to some of the most marginalized women on the island who are exhausted. What does it mean to inhabit crisis and to survive its crisis-ness? This dissertation chapter thinks through these two vignettes and others from ethnographic fieldwork in Sri Lanka to reflect on the category of crisis and its relationship to knowledge production. Crisis, Themal argues, is a discourse that seeks to multiply within the social body by rendering knowledge possible only through a specific mode of interpretation. He draws attention to and challenges the narrowing of the discursive field to stories of suffering and abjection of the masses, asking what alternative narrative possibilities emerge when we attend to the intimate life of intra and inter-subjectivity.
Themal is a doctoral candidate in Anthropology researching how Liberal modernity unfolds in Sri Lanka through certain modes of being in the world, such as speech, action, silence, and absence. Themal centers the queer figure in this theory of the lived conditions of Liberalism to argue that queerness is central to our critiques of the dominant political-moral ideology of our time.
Date posted
Aug 30, 2024
Date updated
Oct 15, 2024