Gendered nostalgia and post-war Sri Lanka: perspectives on women’s loss and violence

In this article, we develop the concept of women’s “gendered nostalgia” as narrated by war-affected Sri Lankan Tamil women in the present. We define gendered nostalgia as a normative and gendered imagining and longing for an idealized past, and examine how Tamil women remember and narrate wartime lives and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in gendered ways. Our conception of gendered nostalgia centers around gendered memory and questions or contestations around gendered ideas of war, sexual violence, women’s safety, and women’s empowerment in the past. We examine the relationship between the past and the present underpinning gendered nostalgia and how a militarized and repressive post-war context reinforces the importance and emotive appeal of certain interpretations of violent actors. We see gendered nostalgia as a form of political contestation amid an oppressive present, which is often overlooked in mainstream studies of the Sri Lankan conflict, militant groups, and memory. We also examine gendered nostalgia as related to social narratives that traverse time and space. Our analysis has implications for understandings of gendered politics of war, gendered memory, and the lived everyday challenges experienced by war-affected women.