Between Earth and Sky: Queering and Querying the Subject of Sex from the Margins

The chapter is an engagement with concerns of queer subjectivity among a group of minority Tamil and Muslim LGBTIQA+ persons in Sri Lanka as they become implicated in the production of Sex as a discursive, material construct of the Body (biopower) and, in turn, negotiate with the institutions of medicine, the structures of state and society. Drawing upon the works of Foucault and Butler, the chapter looks at the body as a productive site of sex and sexualities, producing the workings of the institution of medicine and the interface between it and other technologies of power, structures of the state, such as bureaucracy, family, and informal social structures. Queer sexualities pose a challenge to this norm. But the discourse of sex is deeply implicated in various operations of marginalities, underscoring the fault lines of class, gender, and ethnicity. This chapter is an intervention in the discourses of queer subjectivity, tracing the ways in which queer persons from the minority communities of Muslim and Tamil navigate the multiple marginalities that mark their bodies as nonnormative. They create spaces of engagement with the way the body is understood in the interface of medical and legal discourses and in ways that are meaningful to them. Their articulations are a critical intervention in the debate on biomedicine and the subversive potential of nonnormative sexualities.