Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how everyday queer & trans lived experience in Sri Lanka intervene in theorisations of crisis, commenting on the absence of attention to categories of joy and pleasure, which bears implications for the ontology of crisis and the limits of its epistemological project.

Paper Abstract:

Sri Lanka experiences the most widespread socio-political crisis of its postcolonial history and its trans men discuss buying strap ons. Leftist feminists who led the popular uprising of 2022 preach of ceaseless struggle to some of the most marginalised queer women on the island, who listen bemused. What does it mean to inhabit crisis and to survive its crisis-ness? Thinking through these two vignettes, culled from fifteen months of dissertation fieldwork, I explore the textures, intensities, and orientations of daily queer and trans life enduring crisis in Sri Lanka. I suggest that the quotidian experience of crisis is one that cannot be fully represented by the dominance-resistance paradigm, and that queer and trans subjects insist on feeling and desiring in ways that betray the complexities of structural conditions and those suspended within them. Queerness and transness demonstrate that joy and pleasure are not incommensurable with crisis, that in fact crisis may serve as the very conditions of possibility for joy and pleasure. Centring queerness and transness also allows us to interrogate the temporality of crisis, to critically assay its telos and how life is imagined in and post-crisis. Lastly, I argue that queerness and transness enable a critique of the epistemology of crisis, challenging the dominant mode of knowing that disregard the polyvalent, plural nature of crisis. Such an approach traces how marginalised figures seek to inhabit a fullness of being despite, or precisely because, of crisis, which in turn illuminates the ontic and categorical limits of crisis itself.