Abstract
Neoliberalism marks its existence in different contexts in different ways. In Sri Lanka too the effects on people and communities vary depending on gender, ethnicity, social class and location. When unmarried Sri Lankan women migrated to urban areas to work in global assembly lines, deep anxieties about their morality and female conduct were aroused. Enjoying their time away from patriarchal control, young women develop new identities along with a new sexual subculture around the FTZ area. This talk concerns itself with what happens to new desires, knowledge and expectations when they are eventually forced back to villages as prospective brides, new wives and mothers. Showing how political and economic changes initiate struggles over meanings on intimacy, love, sex and marriage, the talk will comment on how desire, intimacy, sex and pleasure are locally specific, classed and are fluid over a person’s life trajectory.

Biography
Dr Sandya Hewamanne is a Cultural Anthropologist in our Department of Sociology. She specializes in gender and sexuality studies, Economic Anthropology and Feminist Anthropology. She is the author of Stitching Identities in a Free Trade Zone: Gender and Politics in Sri Lanka (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2008). She is currently finishing her second manuscript titled “(Un)Disciplined Desires: The Sexual Lives and Struggles of Sri Lanka’s Global Factory Workers. She also teaches Anthropology in the Department and is a visiting scholar at Cornell University, USA.