Themal Indula Ellawala

THEMAL ELLAWALA, then a graduate student at University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, received a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “When Ephemera Bind: On Negative and Positive Space and Queer Relationality in Sri Lanka,” supervised by Dr. Gayatri Reddy. This project explores how Liberal modernity is instituted in Sri Lanka, with a specific focus on how queer and trans Sri Lankans, as well as others, experience Liberalism as the dominant political-moral paradigm on how to be in the world. This project understands Liberal modernity as fundamentally shifting relations (intra-personal, inter-personal, social, structural) between people and categories, and so examines just how queer and trans people, primarily, as well as others experience and negotiate their relationships to the self, family, friends, lovers, labor, the state, the economy, and categories of social difference. A claim this project makes is that the making and unmaking of relations within Liberal modernity occurs through specific modes — speech, silence, presence, absence, action, inaction, certitude, and indeterminacy. Queerness and transness, this project asserts, offer critical vantage points from which the relational dynamics of Liberal modernity can be analyzed, for they are often narrated as intimately related to Liberalism (as the corrupting cultural influences of the west according to detractors or as uniquely possible through Liberal modernity according to activists). Locating these questions at specific sites — crisis, enforced disappearance, the gendered division of labor, activism — this project stages a queer relational critique of Liberalism.