Saturday, November 15, 2014

State racism and sexism in post-war Sri Lanka...

The bloody end to Sri Lanka’s civil war in May 2009 inaugurated a renewed upsurge in Sinhala Buddhist ethno-nationalism. Its outlines were clarified by President Rajapakse himself in his first post-war speech to parliament when he said: “the word minorities have been removed from our vocabulary” and claimed that “no longer are the Tamils, Muslims, Burghers, Malays and any others minorities.” He did not however say that there are no longer any majorities for that would take away the very corner stone of the post-war national identity (re)building project.

This project is in fact fuelled by a hegemonic Sinhala Buddhist identity steeped in brash triumphalism on the one hand and deep insecurity on the other, paving the way for the valorization of the military, the binary construction of ‘traitors’ and ‘patriots’ and the lack of tolerance for all dissent. Central to this redefinition of national identity is the celebration of a glorious Sinhala-Buddhist past as well as redefinition of gender roles and identities based on the conception of an ideal woman in Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist ideology and historiography. Typical of ethno-religious nationalisms around the world, familial ideology is a key pillar of this discourse with serious adverse implications for women and gender equality in post-war Sri Lanka.

Feminist scholarship distinguishes between emancipatory, civil, forward-looking or modernizing nationalisms and nationalisms that exalt the religion, culture, and traditions associated with a politically dominant group. In the latter ‘the family’ often serves as a foundational metaphor or trope for constructing national unity with different roles allocated to men and women within it. Far from simply being a description of an empirical social reality of kinship or household structures, ‘the family’ in this discourse has immense ideological significance and meaning. This discourse operates to naturalize and universalize the sexual division of labour, where the woman, as ‘good’ wife and mother is primarily responsible for child rearing and domestic labour, while the man is constructed as the economic provider and breadwinner, even though the social reality maybe very far from this. This brand of nationalism formulates rights and obligations in ways that strengthen the masculinity of the public sphere and the femininity of the private sphere. Full story...

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