Ghostly desires: Sexual subjectivity in Thai cinema and politics after 1997

Ghostly Desires is a study of transformations in understandings of gender and sexuality across media and social fields in Thailand after the Asian economic crisis. This dissertation pays special attention to affect and examines how modern and traditional notions of negativity regarding sexuality inform multiple domains within a reviving Thai cinema as well as in the sphere of state and activist sexual politics. Taking Nonzee Nimibutr's Nang Nak (Ghost Wife, 1999) as its first filmic case, it begins by detailing how contemporary Thai cinema's scripted fantasy space of female death and haunting links femininity to issues of national-cultural identity and modernity. In close connection, it elaborates on how, in the late 1990s and 2000s, Thai state sexual politics attempted through the disciplinary measures of social ordering and cultural monitoring to shape bodies and identities, significantly predicating cultural recovery on the reordering of sexuality and gender roles. The subsequent analysis of a Hong Kong-Thai coproduced subgenre of horror films takes up transnational aspects of film production and content to examine how especially Danny and Oxide Pang's The Eye (Khon Hen Phi, 2002) sheds light on the transformation of Chinese femininity from denigrated minority identity to pan-Asian ideal. Finally, Ghostly Desires investigates feminist and queer avantgarde interventions into the conventions by which historical elements are currently brought to bear on Thai sexual subjectivities. The ways in which video artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (Lament of Desire (Thuk Haeng Prathana), 1999; Why Is It Poetry Rather Than Awareness? (Thamai Thueng Mi Rot Kawi Thaen Khwam Ru Than?), 2002) and independent filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady (Sat Pralat), 2004; Syndromes and a Century (Saeng Satawat), 2006) defamiliarize Thai Buddhist forms and folkloric motifs are particularly pertinent to this analysis. The dissertation thereby traces current logics of sexual and ethnic minoritization through social and political crises as well as through the aesthetics of popular cinema, independent film, and avantgarde video, supplementing the study of image and text with ethnographic data. As a critical history of contemporary sexuality, Ghostly Desires aims also to interrogate the chronologies that the scholarship to date has established for Thai sexual subjectivities.