Field: Sociolinguisitcs Title: Same Sex Desire and Imagining the Nation in Contemporary Sri Lanka

In October 2018, at a large political gathering, the President of Sri Lanka used the relatively pejorative slang term butterfly (meaning “gay”) to refer to the Prime Minister. This insinuation was deployed to justify the President’s unconstitutional attempt to pressure the Prime Minister to step down. Such events, not so uncommon, illustrate how non-heterosexual identities—already criminalised under Sri Lankan law—come into direct conflict with the pervasive hegemonic ethnonationalist discourses that shape everyday life in the country. This study, based on the experiences of non-heterosexual men in Sri Lanka, examines how they conceptualise, negotiate, and contest their subjectivities in relation to dominant national imaginaries, and how they signal their belonging or non-belonging.

Using ethnography as the primary method and snowball sampling, I interviewed forty-four English and/or Sinhala-speaking participants from diverse ethnic (Sinhalese, Tamil, Moor Muslim, Burgher, Bora, Malay) and religious (Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian) backgrounds. Moreover, I conducted five focus group discussions. All participants self-identified as gay, bisexual, and/or nachchi .

The thesis comprises four analytical chapters. The first two chapters situate and map the broader ideological landscape by demonstrating how social categories, personhood, and linguistic resources contribute to the construction and contestation of gendered and sexual subjectivities. Building on this foundation, the final two analysis chapters shift attention from the production of these structures to how individuals navigate and negotiate them in their everyday lives.

Since the thesis examines discourses that integrate same-sex desire and national imaginaries, articulated in Sinhala and English and inseparable from Sri Lanka’s colonial past, a postcolonial outlook is necessary. While all chapters deal with the colonial influence on the non-heterosexual bodies to some extent, the third and fourth chapters have a clear engagement with it: In the third analysis chapter, I examine the narratives of livability among non-heterosexual men where noncitizenship and the resulting non-belongingness render them dispensable, I focus on how strategically they negotiate this to gain “self actualisation”(Nir, 2012).

Overall, drawing on Mbebe’s (2022) notion of critical and inclusive humanism, the thesis rejects an essentialist understanding of identity, except where essentialism is strategically mobilised (Spivak, 1990). Rather than treating participants’ identities as fixed or singular, the analysis demonstrates that most participants make claims to ordinary citizenship, recognition, and livability rather than engaging exclusively in identity politics. However, the nachchi category constitutes a notable exception, where collective identity assumes a more central role in negotiating recognition. The thesis further considers how access to global LGBTIQ identities, non-profits, and activism reshape local social relations while simultaneously producing new subject positions within neoliberal frameworks. Ultimately, by foregrounding locally meaningful categories, linguistic practices, and experiences, this study contributes to the development of a non-heterosexual ethno-episteme rooted in the Global South.