Sensing Bodies, Sensual Assemblages: Masculinity and Queerness Under an Umbrella.

What happens to our stories of masculinity when they begin from the sensory and queer? This essay is an exercise in such storytelling, in particular the narration of two male bodies huddled under an umbrella in the pouring rain. Centering an ethnographic vignette from my fieldwork on queer erotics conducted in Sri Lanka in 2016 I read through the literature on hegemonic masculinity in Sri Lanka as well as sensory masculinities to insist on theorizations of masculinity that are more nuanced and supple and attend to the lived complexity of a structure. Through a speculative interpretive mode that braids the sensory and the discursive, the structural and the inter/intra-personal, this paper suggests that masculinity can be conceptualized as an assemblage that is always in formation, one constituted by symbolic, hormonal, libidinal, political, material, affective, historical phenomena and always in flux, responding to specific calibrations and intensities of stimuli. Such a theorization of masculinity allows me to think of the queer desire in this ethnographic scene as not anomalous, but rather made possible by the very conditions of normative masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]