CCCW seminar: Christianity, class, and masculinity

Abstract

Christian missions and colonial education profoundly reshaped Sri Lanka’s social landscape, leaving Christian schools as powerful institutions long after independence. Although Christians form a minority, prestigious former missionary colleges continue to educate much of the island’s political and economic elite. 

This presentation analyses how these schools have produced and stabilized specific ideals of middle- and upper-class masculinity from late colonial rule into the present. It traces how curricula, discipline, school rituals, and extra-curricular activities such as scouting and sports cultivated a Christian, English-speaking, heteronormative male subject imagined as modern, respectable, and globally mobile. Placed in relation to Buddhist and state schools, Christian education appears as a key site where class privilege, masculinity, and a “secular,” multicultural form of Christianity are tightly entangled. These institutions offer a language of tolerance, meritocracy, and good citizenship while simultaneously reproducing ethnicized and classed boundaries of belonging and leadership. 

By foregrounding these dynamics, the presentation shows how Christian schooling has helped to shape postcolonial masculinities and continues to structure access to power in Sri Lanka’s contemporary democracy. More broadly, the lecture speaks to debates on religion and secularism, postcolonial nation-building, and the gendered production of elite subjectivities in South Asia and beyond.

About the speaker

Dr Jessica A Albrecht is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies (“Alternative rationalities and esoteric practices from a global perspective”) at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Her main research area lies in the history of religions in late colonial and postcolonial South Asia, particularly Sri Lanka. In addition, she works on gender, queer and crip studies approaches in the study of religion with a specific focus on (post)colonial societies.