English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

This paper explores the representation of queer men’s unequal sexual citizenship in Sri Lanka in a Sri Lankan Anglophone play, focusing on its problematisation of an ambiguous ‘sodomy’ prohibition. I examine  The One Who Loves You So  (2019), a text in which the illegality of queer men’s offline and online intimacies is paradoxically depicted as both affirmed and open to interpretation. The textual analysis is contextualised by the Sri Lankan state’s consistent history of equivocating on who or what the country’s ‘sodomy laws’ criminalise, particularly when facing international human rights pressure. The state’s equivocation is surprisingly overlooked or dismissed as strategy in most current scholarship and activism: the trend is to think in terms of a hard state stance and a categorical criminalisation. The play lays the ground to grapple with the work done by equivocation, for instance in insidiously regulating same-sex intimacy and marking the conditional status of queer sexual citizenship in Sri Lanka. I plead for attention to the play’s intersectional approach, in particular how queer privilege/disprivilege mediates gradations of empowerment and disempowerment in an uncertain legal situation. The essay argues for moving beyond the idea of strategic evasiveness to recognising a state politics of equivocation on decriminalisation.

south asian popular culture

“It’s illegal but it’s not, like,  really  illegal”: Sri Lanka’s ‘sodomy laws’, the politics of equivocation, and queer men’s sexual citizenship in  The One Who Loves You So