How bodies matter: working-class women’s theater in a time of war

Abstract

Contemporary working-class women’s theaters from within Export Processing Zones in Sri Lanka are rich sites for documenting the development and nature of working-class, feminist and ethnic consciousness. Through a careful analysis of workers’ ‘development dramas’ – theater that contests dominant forms of development – their performative acts on a factory floor, and visual materials, this paper will explore how bodies are produced and made to matter. I will demonstrate how from their inception in the late 1970s onward, these zones were designed to cater to the needs of neoliberal capital and an increasingly ethnicized state at war with separatist Tamil forces. As such, even as the welfare state has been dismantled by neoliberalism, the military and ethnic powers of the state were expanded through these zones. An analysis of workers’ plays allows us to understand the relationship between ethnic war and neoliberalism as they intersect with gender. These plays allow us to explore the conditions of possibility for a working-class feminist consciousness and its limits. To conclude, this paper will consider how these zones have changed after 2009, in the post-war context, with the inclusion of Tamil women workers within.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• ethnic war
• women workers’ theater
• Sri Lanka
• Export Processing Zones

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank members of two writing groups I belong to. So thank you Amelia Klein, John Connor, Lenora Warren, Benjamin Child, Christian DuComb, Dana Olwan, Neelika Jayawardane, and Carol Fadda-Conrey for your feedback and careful reading. Elin Diamond, Richard Dienst, Sonali Perera and Candice Amich read earlier drafts and helped me shape this paper. Thank you Kanchana Ruwanpura for helping me revise this version.

Notes

1 All translations of workers’ plays from Sinhala to English are mine. I worked with scripts of plays archived in the Women’s Centre main office.

2 Estate Tamils or Indian Tamils, as they are still called despite two centuries of living in Sri Lanka, were brought as indentured laborers by the British in the nineteenth century to work on the island’s tea plantations. They are often marginalized for being low-caste and poor by both Sinhala and Tamil peoples who have lived in the island longer. A small number of Estate Tamils could work in the EPZs during the war because they were considered to be different from Tamils from the North and East and so seen as safe.