Abstract
In Thailand, genderscapes, or the terrain of gender and sexuality, continue to evolve quickly, with alternative genders proliferating. I argue that genderscapes provide a provisional conceptualization of contemporary Thai gender and sexuality. The lines between tom : woman : kathoey : gay : man are neither clear nor fixed, but coalesce around these five key formations. These categories are grounded via the repetition and ritualization of routine practices in everyday life as they appear to others but also remain fluid in that gender performances exceed their intentions and interpretations. Genderscapes also account for historical transformations and the localization of foreign influences. Local gender variation, rather than being usurped by modern Western forms, continues to expand. Furthermore, genderscapes remain flexible to the social positioning and ideological stances of individuals. In this chapter, I underscore that genderscapes are inhabited and conditioned by one’s class position and shaped by social evaluation and moral legitimacy.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
This research is part of a larger project comparing how class structures kathoey and gay life opportunities, romantic partner preferences, and risk for HIV. Anthropological fieldwork consisting of participant observation, in-depth interviews, and discourse analysis of media was conducted for 42 months between 2004 and 2011 with approximately 300 gay/kathoey informants and their families and friends. Emphasis was placed on class differences and East Asian cultural flows.
- 2.
Nouns from Thai are not modified to express plural form. That is, like “sheep,” the plural of “kathoey” is “kathoey.” Thai transliteration is rendered in a modified version of the Royal Institute system unless a common or preferred rendition exists.
- 3.
The bissu are transgender ritual specialists whose mixture of male and female characteristics identify and represent the undifferentiated nature of the universe. Bissu gender unity allows them to access spiritual powers unattainable by males or females. Peletz (2006) notes that this pattern exists throughout Southeast Asia. However, the situation in Thailand is more complex. Transgender and gay ritual specialists are currently increasing in popularity in both the North and Central regions, yet the lack of an historical record makes it unclear whether this is a resurgence of prior practices. Of course, transgender ritual specialists exist in other world areas, with the hijras of South Asia perhaps the most well-known case.
- 4.
As in other parts of Asia, there is not an emphasis on “coming out” in Thailand. However, unlike Confucian Asian societies, there is less emphasis on hiding one’s gender/sexual nonconformity. Effeminate gay will often state that people know about their sexual orientation, even if they have not been told, because they “show” themselves.
- 5.
The third person singular pronoun in Thai is gender neutral.
- 6.
Pile sorts are a cognitive mapping procedure to understand how community members think about and attach meaning to different items within a conceptual domain. I began the exercise with a free list to identify the phet respondents conceived of as most salient. Up to 22 terms were then sorted based on similarity. If there were more than three initial piles, I asked participants to subsequently sort into three piles and then two piles as I wanted to see if the three-sex system would be reproduced and how genders in the third category, especially kathoey, would be categorized as males or females. There were 37 participants.
References
Altman, D. (2001). Global sex. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bao, J. (2005). Marital acts: Gender, sexuality, and identity among the Chinese Thai Diaspora. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Barmé, S. (2002). Woman, man, Bangkok: Love, sex, and popular culture in Thailand. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bishop, R., & Robinson, L. S. (1998). Night market: Sexual cultures and the Thai economic miracle. New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Connors, M. K. (2007). Democracy and national identity in Thailand. London: NIAS Press.
Davies, S. G. (2010). Gender diversity in Indonesia: Sexuality, Islam and queer selves. New York: Routledge.
Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: Vol. 1. An introduction. New York: Vintage.
Herdt, G. (Ed.). (1996). Third sex, third gender: Beyond sexual dimorphism in culture and history. New York: Zone Books.
Jackson, P. (1995). Dear uncle Go: Male homosexuality in Thailand. Bangkok: Bua Lunag Books.
Jackson, P. (1997). Kathoey>< gay>< man: The historical emergence of gay male identity in Thailand. In L. Manderson & M. Jolly (Eds.), Sites of desire, economies of pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific (pp. 166–190). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jackson, P. (1999a). An American death in Bangkok: The murder of Darrell Berrigan and the hybrid origins of gay identity in 1960s Thailand. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 5, 361–411.
Jackson, P. (1999b). Tolerant but unaccepting: The myth of a Thai ‘gay paradise’. In P. Jackson & N. Cook (Eds.), Genders and sexualities in modern Thailand (pp. 226–242). Bangkok: Silkworm Books.
Jackson, P. (2000). An explosion of Thai identities: Global queering and re-imagining queer theory. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 40(4), 405–424.
Jackson, P. (2003). Performative genders, perverse desires: A bio-history of Thailand’s same-sex and transgender cultures. Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 9. Retrieved June 6, 2004, from http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue9/jackson.html
Jackson, P. (2004). The Thai regime of images. Sojourn, 19, 181–218.
Jackson, P. (2009). Capitalism and global queering: National markets, parallels among sexual cultures, and multiple queer modernities. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 15, 370–395.
Jackson, P. (2010). The ambiguities of semicolonial power in Thailand. In R. Harrison & P. Jackson (Eds.), The ambiguous allure of the west: Traces of the colonial in Thailand (pp. 37–56). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Jackson, P. A., & Cook, N. M. (Eds.). (1999). Genders & sexualities in modern Thailand. Bangkok: Silkworm Books.
Jackson, P. A., & Sullivan, G. (Eds.). (1999). Lady boys, tom boys, rent boys: Male and female homosexualities in contemporary Thailand. New York: Routledge.
Jeffrey, L. A. (2002). Sex and borders: Gender, national identity, and prostitution policy in Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Käng, D. B. (2011). Paradise lost and found in translation: Queer media loci in Bangkok. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17, 169–191.
Käng, D. B. (2012). Kathoey “in trend”: Emergent genderscapes, national anxieties, and the re-signification of male-bodied effeminacy in Thailand. Asian Studies Review, 36, 475–494.
Loos, T. (2006). Subject Siam: Family, law, and colonial modernity in Thailand. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Mills, M. B. (1999). Thai women in the global labor force: Consuming desires, contested selves. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Morris, R. (1994). Three sexes and four sexualities: Redressing the discourses of gender and sexuality in contemporary Thailand. Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique, 2, 215–243.
Morris, R. (1995). All made up: Performance theory and the new anthropology of sex and gender. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), 567–592.
Morris, R. (1997). Educating desire: Thailand, transnationalism, and transgression. Social Text, 15, 53–79.
Morris, R. (2000). In the place of origins: Modernity and its mediums in Northern Thailand. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Muecke, M. (1984). Make money not babies: Changing status markers of Northern Thai women. Asian Survey, 24, 459–470.
Mulder, N. (1997). Thai images: The culture of the public world. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.
Peletz, M. (2006). Transgenderism and gender pluralism in Southeast Asia since early modern times. Current Anthropology, 47(2), 309–340.
Peletz, M. (2009). Gender pluralism: Southeast Asia since early modern times. New York: Taylor & Francis.
Pramoj Na Ayuttaya, P. (2008, September 14). The variety of kathoey in Thai society. Unpublished paper presented at Kathoey are not women and don’t have to be as beautiful as a pageant contestant seminar, Chiang Mai.
Rubin, G. (1975). The traffic in women: Notes on the political economy of sex. In R. R. Reiter (Ed.), Toward an anthropology of women (pp. 157–210). New York: Monthly Review Press.
Rubin, G. (1984). Thinking sex: Notes for a radical politics of sexuality. In C. S. Vance (Ed.), Pleasure and danger: Exploring female sexuality (pp. 267–319). Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Scott, J. (1999). Gender and the politics of history. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sinnott, M. (2000). The semiotics of transgendered sexual identity in the Thai print media: Imagery and discourse of the sexual other. Culture, Health & Sexuality, 2(4), 425–440.
Sinnott, M. (2004). Toms and Dees: Transgender identity and female same-sex relationships in Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Sinnott, M. (2007). Gender subjectivity: Dees and Toms in Thailand. In S. Wieringa, E. Blackwood, & A. Bhaiya (Eds.), Women’s sexualities and masculinities in a globalizing Asia (pp. 119–138). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
van Esterik, P. (2000). Materializing Thailand. Oxford: Berg.
Wilson, A. (2007). The intimate economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the global city. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Winichakul, T. (1994). Siam mapped: A history of the geo-body of a nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Winichakul, T. (2000). The quest for “siwilai”: A geographical discourse of civilizational thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Siam. Journal of Asian Studies, 59(3), 528–549.
Winichakul, T. (2010). Coming to terms with the west: Intellectual strategies of bifurcation and post-westernism in Siam. In R. Harrison & P. Jackson (Eds.), The Ambiguous allure of the west: Traces of the colonial in Thailand (pp. 135–151). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Witchayanee, O. (2008, January 9–11). Expounding gender: Transgender (male to female) identities in the Thai-global sex sector. Unpublished paper presented at The 10th international conference on Thai studies, Bangkok.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Nguyễn Tân Hoàng, Mark Johnson, and Evelyn Blackwood, who provided feedback on sections of this chapter. Bene Nightchild was an encouraging Facebook interlocutor. Dr. Pimpawan Boonmongkol of Mahidol University, my local research sponsor, smoothed the way for me when necessary. My research project (Gender Pluralism, Social Status, and Asian Regionalism in Bangkok, Thailand) was approved by the Office of the National Research Council of Thailand. Research funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Käng, D.B. (2014). Conceptualizing Thai Genderscapes: Transformation and Continuity in the Thai Sex/Gender System. In: Liamputtong, P. (eds) Contemporary Socio-Cultural and Political Perspectives in Thailand. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7244-1_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7244-1_26
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-7243-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-7244-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)