Ph.D. Candidate
Ms Monica Ann SMITH

Geographies of Constraint and Dilemmas of Desire: Migrant Women from Sri Lanka to Lebanon

In my PhD dissertation, I analyze the political formations of human relatedness through a focus on intimacies, desires and sexualities.

I do so by drawing upon the results of my fieldwork undertaken in Sri Lanka and Lebanon on migrant women. I look at how a geographical analysis with attention to scale (in particular, the state and individual subject) assists in the understanding of the constructions of human relations. I spotlight kinship ties as well as relations that transgress such ‘naturalized’ associations and assesses how certain human relations come to be (il)legitimated through ‘geographies of constraint’.

However, I do not rely wholeheartedly on a poststructural analysis; rather, with attention to the scale of the human body, I engage with work within philosophy to argue for innate human desire. I put forth that humans have an innate desire to be sane in the world and thus a desire to be connected to the world in a particular way.

I suggest that this connection is inevitably a social one – the result of a desire for intimacy (or human relatedness), the degree of which varies across time and place. I highlight that the ‘geographies of constraint,’ (re)created by the Sri Lankan and Lebanese States (as well as within families, communities and the individual subject) often result in a ‘dilemma of desire’, or the pain that Sri Lankan migrant women experience in the world as they move back and forth without the ability to engage in human relations within the world in a particular way.