Expressions on a dance floor: Embodying geographies of genders and sexualities in Bangkok nightclubbing

This dissertation examines how genders and sexualities are embodied, enacted and contested on nightclub dance floors in Bangkok, Thailand. Innumerable studies have mapped Euro-American sex/sexuality/gender concepts and practices on to the Global South. Here, I invert this practice, placing the case study of Bangkok at the center of my analysis and offering one of the first studies on spatio-temporal relations of gender and sexual embodiments and the first study that brings these literatures together in a Southeast Asian context. My study begins the project of addressing a wider range of sexualized spaces across Thailand and Southeast Asia, contributing to a widening and more diverse literature on gender/sex/sexuality in the context of Thailand.;Completing a one-year ethnography in Bangkok, I conducted intense, embodied and auto-ethnographic participant observation in heterophilic (mixed gender) and homophilic (mono gender) nightclub sites in gay and non-gay areas of the city. As a frequent nightclubber, I attended the sites 4-6 times per week and spent 3-10 hours in and through each site. In addition, I captured spatial dynamics of the nightclubs through photography, systematic fieldnotes, and topographical diagrams of clubbing experiences, dance performances, and other live performances in and outside of the clubs. Utilizing Adam Isaiah Green's sexual fields approach, my findings reveal that embodied gendered and sexualized interactions were highly restricted in gay masculine and women-only sites while heterophilic or mixed gender and assumed heterosexual sites opened up space for innumerable erotic possibilities for clubbers. In particular, I analyze and show how gender organizes the underlying sexual fields of Bangkok nightclubs. While the surface performances of gender emerged as the most salient process of sameness and difference among clubbers in gay masculine sites (homophilic), race and class---mediated through gender---emerged as the most salient site of embodied difference in all-women nightclubs. In heterophilic sites, "feminine" women clubbers, in particular, experienced both enabling and constraining levels of participation, enabling because they opened up possibilities for multiple erotic performances, yet constraining because of the underlying cultural assumption that women's bodies were for display and touchable.