Sri Lankan Digital Masculinities:

Colonial Legacies, Militarised Power, Marginal Identities, and Postcolonial Digital Reconfigurations

ORCID: 0000-0003-3231-6248

Web of Science Researcher ID: I-7578-2016

Dr. Manoj Jinadasa (PhD in Digital Critical Media Studies, Newcastle University, UK)

Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department
Department of Mass Communication, University of Kelaniya

manojjina78@kln.ac.lk

Citations: Jinadasa, M. (2025).Sri Lankan Digital Masculinities: Colonial Legacies, Militarised Power, Marginal Identities, and Postcolonial Digital Reconfigurations. Blogger Manoj Jinadasa.https://manojjinadasa.blogspot.com/2025/12/sri-lankan-digital-masculinities.html

 

Introduction

Masculinity is neither biologically fixed nor culturally universal. It is a historically contingent, socially regulated, and relational configuration of practices through which power, desire, authority, and identity are organised. Masculinities emerge within specific political, economic, cultural, and technological conditions and are always plural, hierarchical, and contested. As Connell (1995) argues, masculinity is best understood as “a configuration of practice within a system of gender relations” (p. 81), rather than as an individual psychological trait.

In Sri Lanka, masculinities are shaped by layered histories of colonialism, nationalism, militarisation, caste and class stratification, and postcolonial modernity. In the contemporary moment, these historical forces intersect with global digital cultures, producing what this article conceptualises as Sri Lankan digital masculinities. These masculinities are performed, negotiated, and contested through social media, online visual cultures, dating platforms, digital activism, and networked publics.

Drawing on global masculinity theory, South Asian scholarship, and Sri Lankan feminist and cultural studies research—including Connell, Butler, Haywood, Osella and Osella, Chatterjee, Nandy, de Alwis, Jayawardena, and de Silva—this article analyses how hegemonic, militarised, marginal, queer, and hybrid masculinities are reconfigured in Sri Lankan digital spaces.

 

Colonial Masculinities and Postcolonial Inheritance

Sri Lankan masculinities were profoundly reshaped by Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonial rule. Colonial governance imposed Eurocentric ideals of male respectability, discipline, rationality, and sexual restraint, positioning Western masculinity as civilised and indigenous masculinities as backward, excessive, or morally suspect. Colonial education systems, legal codes, Christian moralities, and bureaucratic institutions functioned as powerful sites for producing compliant, disciplined male subjects.

Ashis Nandy (1983) theorises colonial masculinity as a psychological project that fractured indigenous male identities, producing a divided self—one aligned with Western rationality and authority, and the other relegated to the realm of shame and primitiveness (p. 11). This psychic split remains central to postcolonial masculinity in Sri Lanka, generating anxieties around vulnerability, sexuality, emotional expressiveness, and bodily autonomy.

Partha Chatterjee’s (1993) analysis of nationalist discourse further illuminates how postcolonial masculinities were reconstituted. Anti-colonial nationalism preserved a gendered separation between the “inner” moral–spiritual domain and the “outer” material–political domain. Masculinity became associated with discipline, sacrifice, and public authority, while non-normative gender expressions were marginalised in the name of cultural authenticity and national respectability. Sri Lankan post-independence masculinities thus inherited colonial hierarchies while rearticulating them through nationalist idioms.

 

South Asian Masculinities: Caste, Respectability, and Social Mobility

South Asian masculinity studies provide crucial insights into the relational and moral dimensions of masculinity. Filippo Osella and Caroline Osella’s (2006) ethnographic work demonstrates that masculinity in South Asia is deeply entangled with caste, class mobility, consumption, respectability, and family obligation. Masculinity is not simply about domination but about achieving moral recognition through proper conduct, economic aspiration, bodily presentation, and social mobility.

These dynamics resonate strongly in Sri Lanka, where masculinities are stratified by caste, ethnicity, rural–urban divides, education, and migration histories. Aspirational masculinities—shaped by overseas labour migration, urban professionalism, and global consumer culture—are increasingly performed in digital spaces through curated images, lifestyle narratives, and transnational aesthetics.

Digital platforms intensify what Osella and Osella describe as masculinity as a moral and relational project, enabling men to negotiate respectability, dignity, and recognition in a postcolonial economy marked by precarity and inequality.

 

Militarised Masculinities and Nationalist Power

Sri Lanka’s prolonged civil war and post-war political culture have produced deeply entrenched militarised masculinities. The figure of the soldier—disciplined, self-sacrificing, emotionally restrained, and loyal to the nation—has become a dominant masculine ideal. Connell (2000) identifies militarism as one of the most powerful institutional producers of hegemonic masculinity (pp. 215–218), a claim acutely relevant to Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankan feminist scholars such as Kumari Jayawardena (1986) and Malathi de Alwis (1998) demonstrate how nationalism regulates gendered bodies and emotions, privileging male sacrifice while marginalising women’s agency and alternative masculinities. Nelufer de Silva’s work further extends this analysis by foregrounding embodiment, affect, and mediated nationalism. De Silva (2014, 2018) shows how nationalist masculinity legitimises specific emotions—patriotism, stoicism, and controlled aggression—while rendering dissent, vulnerability, grief, or queer desire suspect.

Digital media both reinforce and destabilise militarised masculinity. Nationalist narratives circulate aggressively online, yet digital platforms also expose the psychological costs of militarisation, as young men articulate trauma, unemployment, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion—experiences historically silenced within nationalist masculine discourse.

 

Marginal and Subordinate Masculinities in Sri Lanka

Sri Lankan masculinities are internally hierarchical. Connell’s (1995) framework of hegemonic, subordinate, and marginal masculinities (pp. 76–80) remains analytically vital. Marginal masculinities include men from economically precarious backgrounds, ethnic minorities, rural communities, disabled men, and those unable to conform to dominant norms of productivity, heterosexuality, and nationalist loyalty.

Sri Lankan cultural studies scholarship documents how these masculinities are often excluded from public legitimacy, yet find alternative visibility in digital environments. Online spaces allow marginalised men to articulate emotional vulnerability, aesthetic creativity, and political critique, challenging colonial and militarised ideals of stoicism and authority.

However, Nelufer de Silva focuses on militarized masculinity, which carries important cautionary implications: digital visibility does not automatically dismantle power. Online platforms reproduce hierarchies through moral policing, cyber harassment, algorithmic visibility, and gendered surveillance, producing new regimes of exclusion even as they enable expression.

Digital Masculinity, Performance, and Affect

Judith Butler’s (1990) theory of gender performativity is particularly relevant in digital contexts, where masculinity is continuously enacted through images, captions, interactions, and algorithmic feedback. Masculinity becomes a curated and aestheticised performance—stylised through selfies, fitness culture, fashion, grooming, and emotional disclosure.

Rosalind Gill (2003) identifies the rise of emotionally expressive and grooming-conscious masculinities within contemporary media culture (p. 38), a trend increasingly visible among Sri Lankan youth. Hochschild’s (1994) concept of emotional labour helps explain how men learn to manage vulnerability, intimacy, and authenticity online (p. 24). These practices challenge colonial and militarised norms of emotional restraint while simultaneously generating new pressures of self-surveillance and affective discipline.

 

Digital Media and the Expansion of Masculine Practices

Digital and networked media have dramatically expanded how masculinities are performed and circulated. These platforms allow for creative self-presentation, affective expression, and identity experimentation that go far beyond traditional masculine codes of stoicism, emotional restraint, and heteronormative dominance. Butler’s notion that gender is “a stylised repetition of acts” resonates powerfully in digital contexts, where gestures, aesthetics, and behaviours are repeatedly performed across platforms, gradually shifting normative understandings of gender (Butler, 1990, p. 140).

Men now use digital spaces not only to affirm hegemonic ideals of manhood but also to explore vulnerability, romance, erotic desire, and aesthetic self-care—practices earlier sociological accounts often positioned outside masculine norms. These developments are clearly evident in Sri Lankan digital environments, where men engage in selfie culture, fitness aesthetics, grooming videos, and cultivated emotional disclosure.

 

Queer, Same-Sex, and LGBTIQ+ Masculinities

Digital media are especially significant for queer and same-sex-desiring men in Sri Lanka, where same-sexuality remains criminalised and socially stigmatised. Online platforms function as spaces of exploration, desire, safety, and community formation.

Sri Lankan queer scholarship and activism demonstrate how digital spaces enable coded performances, transnational queer affiliations, and hybrid masculinities that negotiate family obligation, religious morality, and global LGBTQ+ aesthetics. These masculinities are not Western imitations but locally situated, postcolonial formations shaped by risk, intimacy, and creative survival.

Connell’s (1995) argument that gay masculinities are structurally subordinated within hegemonic gender orders (p. 78) remains relevant; however, digital spaces provide partial ruptures in this hierarchy by enabling visibility, solidarity, and affective belonging.

 

Limits of Masculinity Theory

British social theorist Chris Haywood provides important insight into how masculinities are conceptualised and reconfigured in contemporary contexts, including media and education. Haywood’s work interrogates the conceptual limits of masculinity, challenging scholars to move beyond fixed categories and to recognise the multiplicity and fluidity of masculinities in everyday life (Haywood & Mac an Ghaill, 2013).

Haywood and Mac an Ghaill argue that masculinities are continuously renegotiated through social interactions, cultural representations, and institutional discourses rather than being passively reproduced (2013, Chapters 1–3). This perspective resonates strongly with Sri Lankan digital contexts, where men adapt and negotiate masculine identities through ongoing engagement with global digital culture.

 

Global Perspectives on Masculinity

Global masculinity studies—from the United States, Britain, Australia, Europe, and South Asia—collectively emphasise that masculinities are socially constructed, historically contingent, and power-laden. Michael Kimmel’s work foregrounds masculinity as a relational and political project shaped by inequality and cultural norms (Kimmel et al., 2005). British sociologists such as Máirtín Mac an Ghaill highlight the intersection of masculinity with education, class, and ethnicity, offering valuable frameworks for understanding Sri Lankan digital masculinities as intersectional formations.

South Asian scholarship further demonstrates how caste, labour, consumption, and postcolonial histories produce masculine identities distinct from Western models. Osella and Osella’s (2006) work reinforces the necessity of situating Sri Lankan digital masculinities within a regional and postcolonial analytical framework.

 

Digital Media as Emotional and Political Space

Digital platforms have become crucial arenas for emotional expression, political mobilisation, and identity advocacy. While traditional masculinities prized emotional restraint, digital spaces increasingly foster vulnerability, affective openness, and peer-based support networks. Hochschild’s (1994) notion of the “emotional culture of the self” helps explain how emotional expression has become a marker of authenticity in contemporary social life (p. 24).

Digital masculinities are also overtly political. Across South Asia, online platforms enable young men to engage in political critique, activism, and collective resistance against corruption, authoritarian governance, and social inequality. These practices reconfigure masculinity as politically agentive rather than passive.

 

Hybrid Configurations, Power, and Resistance

Contemporary Sri Lankan digital masculinities reflect hybrid configurations that incorporate emotional expressiveness, aesthetic experimentation, queer subjectivities, and political advocacy (Demetriou, 2001, p. 349). Digital spaces allow for experimentation and resistance, yet they also reproduce misogyny, homophobia, exclusionary nationalism, and class privilege.

Power, therefore, does not disappear in digital environments; it mutates, circulates, and reasserts itself in new forms through mediated practices and algorithmic cultures.

 

Conclusion

Sri Lankan digital masculinities are historically layered, socially stratified, and technologically mediated. Colonial legacies, nationalist militarisation, caste and class hierarchies, and global digital cultures intersect to produce masculinities that are multiple, unstable, and contested.

By integrating global masculinity theory with South Asian and Sri Lankan scholarship—particularly the contributions of Osella and Osella, Chatterjee, Nandy, Jayawardena, de Alwis, and Nelufer de Silva—this article demonstrates that digital media function as critical sites where masculinity is both reproduced and reimagined. Marginal, queer, and subordinate masculinities gain affective and representational space, even as structural inequalities persist.

Sri Lankan digital masculinities thus offer a powerful lens for understanding gender, power, and identity in a digitally saturated postcolonial society of the Global South.

 

 

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