THE role of women in Sri Lankan society is a topic that has been debated and fought over for several centuries. During the British colonial period, for example, a significant strand of nationalist, anticolonial agitation centered on the role and status of Ceylonese women, both within and outside the home. As I have argued elsewhere pace Chatterjee (see de Alwis, 1998b; Chatterjee 1989), it was bourgeois Ceylonese women's bodies, beliefs, and behavior that were produced as the repositories as well as signifiers of Ceylonese "culture" and "tradition" in the face of the onslaught of colonialism and modernity (which worked hand in glove) upon Ceylonese society. The education of women, their employment outside the home, their agitation for political rights, their assumption of political office, etc., have been perceived as potential threats to women's "traditional" roles and status within Ceylonese society at various moments in Ceylonese history. Notions of "tradition" and "modernity," "staffs" and "change" were thus not only intimately intertwined with conceptions of Tamil and Sinhala "womanhood" but co-constitutive of each other (de Alwis, 1998a).
While the formulation and content of many of these debates and discourses on the role of women may have differed significantly at various historical moments, and due to different political, economic, or social catalysts, I wish to argue that the primary premise of such debates and discourses have not changed; Sri Lankan women, be they Sinhala, Tamil, or Muslim, continue to be constructed as the reproducers, nurturers, and disseminators of "tradition," "culture," "community," and "nation." In this paper, I want to think about how such discourses have been reiterated as well as resisted, during the past two decades. While my primary focus will be the mobilization of such discourses in the context of ethnic and antistate violence, I wish to preface such an analysis with a brief discussion of the discourses that have been engendered by two important shifts in the local economy that are largely dependent on the sweat and tears of women: the increasing reliance on garment and labor exports for the earning of foreign exchange.
By the late 1980s, public concern regarding the exploitation of these women workers by foreign and local capitalists began to be superimposed by moralistic discourses that sought to censure the "decadent" and "loose" practices of "innocent village damsels" from "traditional" homes who had become doubly susceptible to the corruptions of the big city due to the absence of parental supervision and domestic stability. A lifestyle marked by the purchase and adornment of fancy clothes, jewelry, and makeup, along with a shift toward "provocative" and "unrespectable" behavior leading to unwholesome sexual liaisons, unwanted pregnancies, and unsanitary abortions, was posited as having become the norm among these women. (2)
Such discourses portray these peasant women as having been jackknifed from "primitivity" to "moral decadence" in the same way that bourgeois women were perceived to have been transformed several decades previously. Ironically, the women garment workers are perceived to have been corrupted because of too little education, unlike the bourgeois women who had become corrupted because they were too educated in Western ways. (3) This idea is also premised on a particular conception of the "village" and rural life in general, which posits it as being pure, slow-paced, and free of vice or violence.
Though many of these women garment workers are the primary wage earners for their families, and the mainstay of the garment export industry, they continue to be viewed and treated in a derogatory fashion by all strata of Sri Lankan society; while some view them as easy prey in terms of cheap labor, captive markets, or sexual conquests, others seek to make an example of them by censuring their excessive patterns of consumption and/or sexual behavior. While it is heartening that many of these workers have refused to be exploited in these ways and have formed their own groups to protest a variety of injustices that have been perpetrated against them, it is also saddening that very few constructive or organized steps have been taken by successive governments to ensure that these women's living and working conditions are improved, and that they can walk the streets without fearing that they will be harassed or raped.
