Law and LGBTIQ People in Sri Lanka : Developments and Narrative Possibilities

This article focuses on both describing legal developments pertaining to LGBTIQ persons in Sri Lanka and interrogating the limits of how their legal status has been understood. It claims that the dominant trend in terms of narrativising LGBTIQ-related issues of law and policy in Sri Lanka has been writing which is quite narrow and mainly literalist, fixated on legal and policy frameworks and their reform, with a few notable exceptions. Understandably, activists and scholars have been preoccupied with lobbying at international and national human rights fora for the reform of laws (including so-called ‘sodomy’ laws) and the introduction of policies to tackle discrimination against LGBTIQ persons. But what began as a strategy has now overtaken the very conceptualisation of ‘legal status’, such that the topic itself is narrativised somewhat deterministically in terms of the progress (or lack thereof) on a rights-based approach to law reform. The article spotlights instances that exceed the focus on the letter of the law and offer the resources to develop ‘thick’ understandings of the rubric of ‘legal status’. The article argues that in order to evolve a more nuanced and evolving approach to law’s relationship with LGBTIQ issues, it is necessary to realise a) that this relationship is narrativised and does not have an a priori or self-evident existence; b) that the narrative should not be confined to and by the logic of strategy (which is itself subject to interrogation); and c) that a literalist approach can be a straitjacket, whereas tropes and narrative constructions demonstrate that the relationship is not fixed but, rather, continually discursively constructed and contested