ABSTRACT
The debates over the semantics and ontological “truth” of sexual subjectivity in South Asia have coalesced at sites of sexual identity (e.g. lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and others), sexual behaviours (e.g. Men having Sex with Men) and alternate “Indigenous” subjectivities (such as kothi/panthi) as competing discourses that attempt to language and determine sexuality. Continuing the labours of scholars such as Gayatri Reddy, Paul Boyce and Sanjay Srivastava, the author suggests that the classification of sexuality is invariably a fraught project due to the overdetermination of sexual desires, intimacies and interiorities that the taxonomical imperative necessitates, as well as the limits such an epistemic endeavour places on situated understandings of erotic experiences. The author intervenes in this debate through a specific provocation: that sexuality in Sri Lanka, and more broadly, is structured by a politic of indeterminacy, which renders erotics uncertain and ambiguous, ephemeral and fundamentally unknowable. Drawing from ethnographic vignettes collected through fieldwork in Sri Lanka in 2016, as well as multiple theoretical genealogies on indeterminacy, the author argues that the unexpected and ambivalent marks queer affects, intimacies and self-conceptions in ways that warrant critical scrutiny. Such a reckoning demands that we acknowledge the ultimate impossibility of the positivist, imperialist ambition of knowing the South Asian sexual subaltern.
