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.

Keywords:

• Migration
• Sexuality
• Gender
• State
• International Agencies
• Lebanon
• Sri Lanka

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Mark Johnson, Claudia Liebelt and Pnina Werbner for their invitation to the conference ‘Diasporic Encounters, Sacred Journeys Gendered Migrants, Sociality and Religious Imagination’ (Keele University, 2009), for which this paper was written. The author thanks Mark Johnson, Pnina Werbner and the anonymous reviewers for excellent and thought-provoking suggestions and comments.

Notes

1. The people involved in the editing of the report will remain anonymous. Rather than implicating individuals, I want this discussion to serve as a constructive critique and a way of opening up further dialogue of how best to address the nexus between sexuality and female domestic labour migration. Working as a researcher for the UNDP RCC HIV Project in 2009, I want this to serve as a critique and a self-reflection for my own work as well. A consideration of power and agency within large international agencies is an important topic in its own right, but beyond the scope of the present essay, the focus of which is on the assumptions and consequences of normative discourses in denying and constraining migrant women's sexual subjectivities.

2. Caritas Internationalis claims to have a budget of US$5.5 billion and a staff of 440,000, operating in more than 165 countries. For the official view, see http://www.caritas.org/about/Caritas_Internationalis.html (accessed August 2009).

3. The US$25,000 project was funded in partnership with the UN's Office of High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR), the ILO, The Netherlands Embassy and Caritas. The movie has been shown internationally at film festivals and universities, as well as at national workshops intended to raise awareness among Lebanese nationals of the plight of migrant workers within the country. In addition, clips of the film are available on YouTube (Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rY91LCyY4s, accessed 12 September 2010) and the national and international press continues to cover the film (conversation with C. Mansour, film director, 2009).