Abstract:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This paper examines how sex workers in Sri Lanka use nachchi, an enregistered speech style, as a way to construct solidarity and intimacy in interaction. Drawing on twenty-three interviews conducted during ethnographic fieldwork in Colombo, I explore how sex workers mobilise femininity and sexually explicit discourse in enacted metapragmatic (Silverstein, 2003) use of nachchi. Using a stance-based framework informed by Kiesling (2018), this paper shows how speakers dynamically construct the persona of a baduwak (Sinhala, derogatorily \u201cloose woman\u201d) through shifting stance dynamics that build trust and affiliation. These stances are relationally calibrated across frontstage and backstage enactments of the persona (Goffman, 1956), allowing speakers to modulate intimacy within the interaction. In initial encounters, speakers adopt a relatively restrained or \u201clow-intensity\u201d parodied femininity, characterised by playful but less sexually explicit expression and cautious interpersonal positioning. As familiarity develops, this shifts toward a more intensified, eroticised, and explicit performativity of parodied femininity, less constrained by respectability norms and spoken with boastful exaggeration. Linguistically, this transition is enacted by the feminine referential form, akk\u0101 (elder sister). As the conversation progresses, the shift in word-final vowel from \u0101 to \u00e9, as in quasi-vocative form akk\u0101, which indexes familiarity, teasing playfulness, urbanness, softness and solidarity, to the vocative form akk\u00e9, which intensifies intimacy and affiliative alignment, enacts the interactional consolidation of solidarity and licenses increased use of sexual discourse and expletives. The emergent persona of the baduwa demonstrates how intensified stance dimensions transform sexual talk into a collective, participatory practice through which solidarity is co-constructed. Parodied femininity thus becomes an erotically charged relational resource for building affiliation and negotiating intimacy. In the talk, I describe how these stances practices must be understood in relation to the ethnographic context in which participants navigate sexual violence, economic precarity, and collective protection within a broader condition of social disbelonging, where visibility, safety, and legitimacy are systematically denied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Part of: Queer Intimacies Abstract: This paper examines how sex workers in Sri Lanka use nachchi, an…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"confab_track":[28],"session_locations":[32],"class_list":["post-735","confab_session","type-confab_session","status-publish","hentry","confab_track-cm-2","confab_location-seminar-room-2-cm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/confab_session"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":736,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/735\/revisions\/736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"confab_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fconfab_track&post=735"},{"taxonomy":"confab_location","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fsession_locations&post=735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}