Erasure of Sexuality and Desire: State Morality and Sri Lankan Migrants in Beirut, Lebanon

Abstract

This paper presents a critical analysis of State and non-State interventions into the intimate and sexual lives of Sri Lankan migrant women in Beirut and interrogates the ways that normative ideals of heterosexual marriage and family are regulated and enforced transnationally. Drawing on research in Lebanon and Sri Lanka in 2006–9, I juxtapose official representations of Sri Lankan migrant women with migrant accounts that disclose the diverse and often transgressive realities of migrant lives. Focusing in particular on a United Nations Development Program report, I highlight how non-State actors, deliberately or otherwise, fall in line with moralistic State discourses in ways that purposefully ignore and act to constrain women's sexual agency in diasporic situations. The promotion and repression of certain sexualities, images, desires and stereotypes leads to the marginalisation of those who deviate from the norm and places them in an even more precarious situation outside state protection.

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