| Sumario: | Merriam Webster named austerity the 2010 Word of the Year, indexing its spectacular entrance into the vernacular during the Great Recession of the 2000s. This discourse often constructed austerity as a European, novel, and economic phenomenon. This essay contends with such myths, by locating its analysis in the colonial and post/colonial history of crisis-riddled Sri Lanka and examining the cultural, quotidian life of austerity. I argue that austerity can be understood as both an economic rationality and aesthetic sensibility that seeks to curtail the excessive, ostentatious, and ornamental. Furthermore, I suggest that both forms of austerity are undergirded by a common moral discourse of prudence, modesty, sacrifice, and restraint. Using queer sartorial aesthetics as analytical object, I read across ethnographic vignettes, media and public discourse, and scholarship to suggest that the queerly clothed body offers unique insights on the scale and ubiquity of austerity as a moral-economic-aesthetic disciplinary formation.
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