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When We Marched (30 October 2018)
There is a constitutional coup in Sri Lanka. There is much more about it at Groundviews, but you can start here if you like. Today, we marched in the thousands in the country’s capital and commercial centre, Colombo. This is a response to things I am reading on social media this evening. (EDITS made re.…
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Where have all the queer women gone?: An Editorial for GenderIT
(Commissioned and originally published by GenderIT.org in December 2017.) How the stories of movements for queer liberation are told is a historically complicated thing. What and who constitute the gay rights movement is a perennial question to which we know now clearly that there is no one answer. There is no homogeneous ‘LGBT’ community in…
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Intergenerational feminisms & sustaining our radical movements: Keynote at UAF-AP Launch (Transcript)
(Keynote address delivered at the launch of Urgent Action Fund Asia Pacific, 24 October 2017, Colombo, held in memory of Sunila Abeysekera: 1952 – 2013.) It is an immense, humbling almost overwhelming honour to be standing here in front of you today. The realization of the Asia Pacific chapter of Urgent Action Fund is the…
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LET WOMEN DECIDE: Some Feminist Perspectives on the ‘Abortion Debate’
(Published originally here on Groundviews on 01 October 2017) At this moment in Sri Lanka, ‘the abortion debate’ has sprung up once again; with the cabinet purportedly attempting to pass a bill which would legalize abortions for women under two circumstances[1] – if the woman is a victim of rape or if the foetus is…
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South Asian Feminisms: A Memorial for Lala Rukh, 23 August 2017 (Transcript)
This is the transcript for the short talk I delivered at the event South Asian Feminisms: A MEMORIAL FOR LALA RUKH, hosted by A Collective for Feminist Conversations and Women and Media Collective, in Colombo on 23 August 2017. The bulk of it includes an excerpt from an essay titled Forging a New Political Imaginary:…
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We need to talk about ‘Free Speech’
We have been hearing a lot about ‘free speech’ recently – and not in the way that we in Sri Lanka are typically used to; not as a call to defend journalists and activists against persecution. For example: the highly divisive Milo Yiannopoulos’ speaking appointment at the University of Berkeley was cancelled in January after…
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Is the internet really democratic?: How the ‘wired world’ excludes women and other marginalized persons
This was a short presentation I delivered (with a few small edits) at a panel discussion organised by the Bar Association of Sri Lanka under the theme “Cross Cutting Dynamics of Online Democracy; Mainstreaming Internet Freedom and Right to Privacy in Sri Lanka” , to address women’s rights within the context of internet…
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A True Sri Lankan Intersectionality: LGBTIQ equality, MMDA reform and more
For awhile now, I’ve been thinking about intersectionality and what it would mean for feminists and other activists in a Sri Lankan context at this moment. For young women activists and queer-rights activists in Sri Lanka, like myself, the temptation is strong to follow young, American liberational discourses. on social justice. We ‘stood with Standing Rock’.…
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Subha M Wijesiriwardena 