ABSTRACT
Questions of queer emancipation are often overlooked in the literature on transitional justice processes. Even if there is some engagement with queer communities, it is typically confined to a victimization logic and presented through a top-down, technocratic, institutionalized lens. Moving beyond such processes and approaches, this chapter foregrounds queer agency by focusing on the Sri Lankan Butterfly for Democracy movement, an exemplary case of micro-level queer engagement that emerged as a collective response to a state-sponsored queerphobic speech in a post-war setting in 2018. Using an autoethnographic approach, it argues that queer activism not only continues to work in parallel with the democratization process but also actively supports and advances democratization processes and justice in post-war contexts, beyond the institutionalization of reconciliation and transitional justice processes. It necessitates equal scholarly attention to queer agency, reminding us of the danger of containing queer engagement only to the formal technocratic processes. The chapter also demonstrates the capacity of informal, spontaneous, and organic emergence of queer mobilizations. In other words, it reminds us that the technocratic formalized approach is not the only place where queering transitions occurs and necessitates the need for moving beyond dichotomous categorizations of transitional justice approaches.
