DEFENSE: “The Art and Torment of Living in a World that Kills You: A Queer-Trans Hermeneutic of Liberalism in Lanka”
Anthropology Dissertation Defense
May 6, 2026
11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Location
BSB 3160
Calendar
Download iCal FileDissertation Defense by UIC Anthropology PhD Student Themal Ellawala
Abstract
This dissertation develops a queer-trans hermeneutic of, or way of reading, liberalism in Ceylon/Sri Lanka, from the 19th century British colonial period to the postcolonial present. It argues that liberalism – that philosophy that has fundamentally structured our political, economic, cultural, and moral conceptions of freedom and the good life – is indelibly defined by a paradox: the simultaneity of a utopic political vision that imagines the liberty, rights, and the flourishing of all (which I refer to as liberalism’s ideal drive) and regimes of extraction, exploitation, and death (or liberal violence). Yet, this paradox must be occluded and liberalism’s role in producing violence concealed for liberalism to continue generating consent and faith in its high promise. Thus, this dissertation develops a way of sensing liberalism in social-political scenes where it is deemed absent, of speculatively reading liberalism’s paradoxical workings where they are most invisible – in the British colonial criminalisation of sodomy, the economic crisis in Sri Lanka (2022-present), enforced disappearance, the extra-legal regulation of sex work. Central to my argument is the claim that, rather than succumbing to its internal contradictions, liberalism persists by disaggregating into components which circulate independently as well as by merging with other political ideologies/forms, such as authoritarianism, militarism, and ethnonationalism. Queerness and transness, attuned as they are to the ephemeral and disavowed, serve as analytical homing devices that allow me to track and trace those liberal occlusions, and the multiple ways that this paradox structures life in modernity. Through twenty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork with queer-trans interlocutors in Sri Lanka and seven months of archival research in Sri Lanka, the UK, and the US, I explore how institutions (e.g., the state, military, the market) and (mainly queer-trans) subjects enact and experience liberalism. This dissertation attends to sensory-embodied lived experience and co-speculatively theorizes the occluded workings of liberalism in the everyday lives of queer-trans interlocutors to produce a mode of reading liberalism where orthodox methods of knowledge production fail to apprehend the disguised and obscured.
Date posted
May 1, 2026
Date updated
May 1, 2026