2024/03/01 by Bruno M. Shirley · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies #Gender Roles and Identity Studies #Anthropological Studies and Insights
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0026749x23000513
openalex publication_date 2024/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract Modern historians have repeatedly cast Sri Lanka’s historical female monarchs as ‘queens’, without critically reflecting on the conceptual limits and nuances of that term. Through a close examination of sources from the early second millennium, and their reception by scholars from the colonial period onwards, I demonstrate that Sri Lanka’s female monarchs—particularly Līlāvatī of Poḷonnaruva (r. 1197–1200, 1209, and 1210)—engaged in a more creative and subversive performance of gender than modern ‘queenship’ allows. In particular, I argue, a discourse of kingship’s inherent masculinity, advanced in literary and didactic texts written primarily by male monastics, was too-willingly accepted by colonial-period scholars. Closer attention to the material evidence of Līlāvatī’s reign, however, challenges this discourse and further suggests a politics of gender beyond the binary.