Educating Desire: Thailand, Transnationalism, Transgression

Educating Desire: Thailand, Transnationalism, and TransgressionAuthor(s): Rosalind C. MorrisReviewed work(s):Source: Social Text, No. 52/53, Queer Transexions of Race, Nation, and Gender (Autumn -Winter, 1997), pp. 53-79Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/466734 .Accessed: 03/05/2012 14:08

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Educating Desire

THAILAND, TRANSNATIONALISM, AND TRANSGRESSION

A Ban on Gay Teachers: Education and Rosalind C. Prohibition in the "Land of the Free" Morris

At the end of December 1996, on the eve of a new year and a new regime under the ostentatiously elected government of Chavalit Yonchaiyudh, Thailand's major institution of teachers' education, the Ratchabat Insti- tute, announced its intention to screen homosexual students.1 The decision to uphold a three-year-old policy banning homosexuals from enrolling in the Institute and receiving teacher training elicited shock and outrage in the transnational arena of gay and queer activism. The Thai state's regulation of sexuality had seemed quite unthinkable until the moment of its publicization and its global electronic dissemination by local activists. Thailand was, after all, one of the few nations in the world to have remained virtually free of legislative sanctions against homosexuality, and it has consequently been made to represent a homoerotic paradise for outsiders, including both gay male tourists and transnational sex radicals.2

In the wake of the Ratchabat Institute's unprecedented policy of exclusion and the sense of shock which greeted it, two sets of issues demand exploration. The first of these concerns the circumstances in which a nation, previously unwilling to enact legislation that would prohibit homoeroticism or in any way regulate it as a symptom of nonnormative identity, would now initiate what Foucault has identified as that complex process of prohibition which can ultimately only incite and con- solidate the object of its sanctioning address.3 The second issue pertains to the imaginal flows by which "sex" in Thailand has become the object of transnational discourses and has been transformed in a circuitous process that has seen the emergence of both new forms of subjectivity and new forms of state sanction. This essay is a speculative and, indeed, tentative attempt to comprehend these issues. In the pages that follow, I offer a sketch of the factors and forces that lie behind the institutional transformations now visible in the Ratchabat Institute policy. In an effort to deconstruct the seemingly teleological history by which more plastic forms of eroticism have been reified under the rubric of sexuality, I will suggest that reformations in the sexual domain are at least partly the result of transnational gazes and of the discourses that Orientalizing and self-

Social Text 52/53, Vol. 15, Nos. 3 and 4, Fall/Winter 1997. Copyright ? 1997 by Duke

University Press.

Orientalizing desire produces. Nonetheless, it is not my primary intention to impute causal relations in what is still a largely opaque history. Rather, I wish to trace the complex linkages between transnational discourses of universal rights, newly local forms of identitarian sexual politics, critiques of the Thai nation-state, and self-defensive prohibitions on the part of the same state. Accordingly, this paper focuses mainly on the symptoms of these linkages as manifested in the emergence in Thailand of what can be called public domesticity: an assertive display of intimacy premised on new organizations of sexual subjectivity. These new forms have not displaced, although they stand in opposition to, earlier logics of disjuncture between performance and identity or being. They are embedded in other fields of knowledge and are inextricably linked to a transformation in vision and, indeed, to the ascendance of sight as the sense for discerning truth. In this economy of visual hegemony the real becomes synonymous with the visible, and performance is rendered purely symptomatic of identity. In this context, formal prohibitions such as that of the Ratchabat Institute can be read as much as instruments of exposure and clarification and as expres- sions of the state's desire to know what the public performances of its subject-citizens signify and to make those performances signify univocally. They can be seen as part of a commitment to eliminate nonnormative identities.

The Ratchabat Institute's policy had been on the books for three years, laying in relative quiet until Bangkok activists and overseas sup- porters challenged the minister of education to revoke the discriminatory policy. The minister, Sukavich Rangsitpol, and the rector of the main Suan Dusit campus, Siroj Polpanthin, refused to do so and instead insisted on the implementation of the screening process.4 In his public statements, Sukavich flatly rejected any argument informed by the logic of individual human rights. He mobilized instead the rhetorical authority of the "future of young people" as his legitimating weapon. Under no circumstances, he claimed, would the "rights" of individuals be permitted to undermine the security of the collective body.5

Sukavich's argument evidences the degree to which dominant but still-fledgling Thai notions of democracy emphasize the production of majority rule rather than the protection of differences or minorities within collectivities.6 Nonetheless, amid the atmosphere of "democratization" and "openness" that has reigned tenuously since the bloody days of May 1992-when a military massacre of unarmed civilians ended in the igno- minious failure of a military junta-this disavowal of individual rights sits uncomfortably with feminist, queer, civil libertarian, and other radical groups in the country.7 Feminists have been among the most vociferous opponents of the policy and have emphasized the risks of majority politics in a nation with numerous political parties, where the very construction of

Rosalind C. Morris

a majority position is problematic, and where that position has been medi- ated by and ultimately subtended to the forces of patriarchal militarism. Although self-avowedly feminist organizations are still relatively marginal to institutional power in Thailand, the present is being self-consciously staged as a moment of political reform in which more equitable representation is the goal and promise of virtually all parties. Indeed, the rewriting of the constitution has become a national pastime.8 The intensity of such activity, with its proliferation of bureaucratic mechanisms, also diagnoses a generalized sense of cultural crisis. Indeed, there is deep anxiety about the declining status of Theravada Buddhism in Thailand, and this sentiment is accompanied by worries about criminality, migrant labor, social dislocation, rampant unemployment, and an emerging pandemic of sub- stance abuse among youths.9 It is in this context, of what is perceived to be deeply ambiguous social transformation, that the Ratchabat Institute's now-public position was greeted with opprobrium by gay and feminist organizations on a global level, even as it was euphorically embraced by conservative and broadly populist organizations in Thailand.

The public discourses surrounding the Institute's antihomosexual stance has a history, of course. On the surface it seems to have emerged first as a reactionary sign of vexation over a series of reports on a failure in national education, marked by declining standards of literacy and skills among graduates and an increasingly inadequate infrastructure. Ironi- cally, much secondary-level and collegiate education is rendered super- fluous in a market in which unskilled and service-sector labor continues to shape the local economy, despite high levels of capitalization.

Insofar as the (now constitutionally) monarchical nation of Thailand is imagined in the idiom of the family, crises in the primary institutions of its reproduction-namely schools-are being read as failures in the pater- nally tutorial relation. Since Chulalongkorn's reign (1868-1910), national education has provided the means by which students are interpellated as Thai subjects and instilled with the moral values by which each of them can be adjudicated in relation to ideal Thai-ness (khwaam-pen-thai). Although there have been periods during this century when the status of the monarch has flagged, filial loyalty to the king has been a paramount value, and general principles of superordination and subordination have been ideologically central to the extent that traditional educational practices have been described in feudal terms on more than one occasion.10 In this context, anyone who assumes the role of the tutor does so, in some important regards, as a representative and metonymic agent of the king. For this reason, charges of failure to uphold national values have enormous gravity. Even so, the relationships between nation, education, and sexuality are more occluded than revealed by the specters of "pederasts" now being cynically invoked by apologists for national family values in

Educating Desire 55

Thailand. Nor is this accidental. A whole series of screen images1' inter- venes here to direct critical attention away from the stakes in education which the Thai state-and every modern state-must necessarily make.

In its public relations releases, the Ratchabat Institute has tied its decision to a series of scandals in which teachers identified as homosexuals have allegedly committed violent and often sexual crimes against students. Initially, a salacious traffic in tales of violent betrayal provided Thai-language dailies with the means to renew the story. At once seeming to crystallize the crisis, these stories nonetheless particularized it in ways that made deeper social analysis virtually impossible. They generated a thrall to the sordid tales of "sexual deviance" and violence, tales in which many readers experienced the oddly disenfranchising pleasures of horror and the numbing satisfactions of outrage. Armed with figures generated by its own research arm, the Ratchabat Institute has maintained its assumption-that there is a statistical association between homosexuality and violent sexual crime-despite criticism in which the Institute itself has been blamed for the rise of violence against students. In an extremely visible column in the English-language daily the Bangkok Post, assistant edi- tor and renowned cultural critic Sanitsuda Ekachai suggests that the incip- ient "fascism" of educational practice in Thailand is the real source of violence against students. For her, that violence is neither exceptional nor particularly associated with homosexuality.'2 One can easily extrapolate from Sanitsuda's claims, and from those made by other scholars of Thai educational history, that this violence is but the antiquated sign of a state forged in the crucible of militarist and antidemocratic nationalism. It is the excess demanded by excess, the inevitable outcome of a regime organized on patriarchal principles and materialized through diffuse relations of debt and dependency, which are nowhere more acutely manifest than in the institution of national education itself.13

The Transnational Circulation of Prohibition

Strong resonances between Thailand and the United States (or other modern states) on issues of cultural value should come as no surprise at the end of the twentieth century. Moralist demands for the restoration of social integrity and the expulsion of difference invariably attend periods of rapid transformation, and if there is a single characteristic that is felt, globally, to mark this moment of late capitalism, it is the sense of acceler- ating change. Despite its emphatically defended status as a never- colonized nation, Thailand shares the "ideoscape" in which dominant American representations circulate.14 It receives a constant intravenous feed of electronic information and images from Hollywood and Capitol

Rosalind C. Morris 56

Hill; despite the relative economic power of Japan in Southeast Asia, American discourses of cultural value continue to have much the same authority that they possessed in the 1960s, when the U.S. government invested in Thai conservatism as part of its effort to staunch the flow of communism in the region.15 Mirroring the anticentrist policies of the United States, the recently created Commission on Thailand's Education in the Era of Globalisation has approved the decentralization of educational administration and curriculum development as well as the devolu- tion of bureaucratic functions onto local governmental bodies. In fact, the new minister of education's "Ten Commandments of Educational Reform" draws inspiration from President Clinton's "Ten-Point Call for Action on Education." When Amornwit Nakornthap, a member of the commission, remarked on the similarity between Clinton's and Sukavich's rhetoric of reform, he played heady tribute to what he perceives as the exemplary assault on educational failure in the United States.16

Inevitably, the politics of decentralization are infused with a deep dis- trust of the central government, which has been widely criticized in the last few decades for economic corruption. However, while the rhetoric of decentralization promises democratization, the process itself tends to con- centrate power in small, prototypically patriarchal institutions. In effect, it returns the metaphorically sustained power of the state as a familial entity (headed by the majestically cloaked/fetishistically invested figure of the father-king) to the institutions that most clearly represent the extension of the patriarchal family itself.

In part, one can understand this process of decentralization as the flip side of Thailand's history of nation formation. As Chai-anan Samuda- vanija has so persuasively argued, Thai nationalism emerged in the after- math of the state's first antimonarchical coup and the rise of constitutionalism in the 1930s. Where constitutionalism forbade, in principle, the development of group interests, it also threatened to undermine bureaucratic power, because it promised the transformation of economic power into political influence. Given the fact that the ethnic Chinese stood to gain most from this transformation, official nationalism in Thailand sought first and foremost to divorce state identity from cultural identity and to constitute the bureaucracy (which was peopled largely by members of the ethnically Thai aristocracy) as an independent entity that could claim for itself the virtually sacred role of protecting the Thai state and its subject-citizens. This virtually autonomous bureaucracy was then paired with the institutions of subject-citizen formation, namely schools and households, leaving the space of civil society vacant. Antistatist practices and expression were immediately rendered as un-Thai, a process that was strengthened in the 1960s and 1970s, when Chinese-influenced commu- nist movements in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand emerged as

Educating Desire 57

Any group that

would demand

the application of

constitutional law

in the interest of

civil liberties is

vulnerable to

accusations of

un-Thai-ness.

Among those

now accused

are minoritarian

ethnic groups, . . .

feminist or labor

organizations,

and rights groups

centered in

gay liberation

projects.

the quintessential figures of threat.17 Although Chinese economic power has since become a force for social transformation and a more legitimate locus of political influence in Thailand, the residual claims of un-Thai- ness remain to be directed at any group that constitutes itself in opposition to the Thai state, either for reasons of political difference or by virtue of alliance with transnational organizations. In effect, any group that would demand the application of constitutional law in the interest of civil liberties is vulnerable to accusations of un-Thai-ness. Among those now accused are minoritarian ethnic groups, including those of the upland areas in northern Thailand, labor organizations, and rights groups centered in feminist or gay liberation projects.

The split between the relatively autonomous field of political bureaucracy and the private spaces of households was bridged during the 1930s and 1940s, Thailand's most fervently nationalist period, by cultural policies that demanded the conformity of personal practice to newly racialized Thai ideals. In a climate where even dress and comportment could be deemed the purview of the state, sexuality nonetheless remained beyond legislative reach. What mattered was that public performances display Thai-ness. If sexual practice remained invisible to the state-or, rather, if the realm of state visibility excluded erotic relations-the performance of masculinity by men was nonetheless demanded by cultural policies such as those that required men to wear hats and ties or to kiss their wives before leaving for work. Some fifty years later, as matters of cultural form are being devolved onto regional administrations and the processes of decentralization are transferring a significant portion of decision making to the local level, anxieties about cultural performance, especially normatively gendered performances, are being felt again and are being articulated in defensive discourses of family values. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this is the moment most troubled by gay idylls and ideals of masculine domesticity, especially when those idylls and ideals entail an explosion of the previous logic of visibility and an insistence on the performance of radical subjectivity, rather than official Thai-ness.

Although I am suggesting that there is something particularly significant, if not yet subversive, in the public performances of intimacy, the Ratchabat Institute's decision has left unclear the manner of determining what constitutes gayness and what can be read as its symptom. Under pressure and legal challenge from local oppositional groups, such an exploration will become necessary and even urgent. Inevitably, new relations in the organization of sex and sexuality will emerge. And the transformations produced in the juridical domain will be at least partially determined by discourses of sexuality now circulating in the transnational arena. As I have argued elsewhere, the signs of such change are already abundantly visible.18 I do not mean to suggest here that Thailand has


been utterly passive in relation to these global processes, or even that one can speak about Thailand without immediately casting its totality into doubt. Many sex radicals in Thailand have embraced the discourses and the politics of gay identity, and many others have sought alliances through membership in transnational organizations. Their not-infrequent invocations of universal human rights are complicated, of course. Like all such invocations, even when made in the interest of radicalism, theirs have assumed the kind of individuated subjectivity that conforms to the model of abstractly equal consumers demanded by transnational capital. For this reason, it is imperative to note that any effort to speak of local gay liberation projects in Thailand (and perhaps in other Asian modernities) must also address the ambivalent alliance between individual subjects seeking sovereignty and the forces of a global economy that would seem, in other respects, to directly undermine such sovereignty. The emancipated modernity being sought by feminists, sex radicals, and gay activists in Thailand is a global one. Or rather, it is, to borrow Erni's suggestive phrase, "a travelling vector within the global imaginary." At once a "rela- tional" or "transnational project" and "a self-administered moment of identity and authority," this modernity is heterogeneous and internally contradicted.19 But it is emphatically not reducible to the localist politics of nationalism. Indeed the kinds of alliances between global forces and minoritarian and civil libertarian movements are necessarily counter- poised to the nation-state-hence the threat that they are seen to pose to Thai-ness.

In the context of this "travelling vector," the Ratchabat Institute's injunction against homosexual student enrollment would seem, at the least, regrettably unremarkable. And yet, news of the policy did come as a shock to many outside of Thailand-announcing as it did that Thailand had finally arrived in the place from which so many Westerners seek escape and into which Thailand seemed to have previously avoided falling. In the end, the surprise that greeted news of the ban as it traveled through cyberspace can be read as a symptom of the gaze through which Thailand has been, and remains, generically seen from abroad. That gaze is undergirded by a crudely anthropological discourse of "culture-as-continuity" and finds itself in unwitting alliance with nationalist self-mythifi- cations in Thailand. Its consequences can be discerned in the ways that Thai state repression and violence have been apprehended. For, despite its regularity, state violence in Thailand is generally treated in international media venues as an exception, a breach of the norm, a rupture. Given that this violence is rather more the rule than the exception,20 it seems necessary to conclude that there exists a (possibly inadvertent) complicity between the Thai state and its outside observers. In this complicitous imaginary, to which gay and queer activists have been variously beholden,

Educating Desire 59

Thailand's never-colonized status makes it the ideal figure of cultural authenticity. That authenticity, like all cultural authenticity, longs for a space prior to reification. And it is thus along the vector of a deeply nostalgic desire-one that imagines Thailand as a domain not yet riven by the binaries of sexual identity-that the powerfully transformative effects of transnational sexuality's discourse will travel. The complicity is then redoubled, for like the impossible projects of salvage ethnography, nostalgic gay desire can only annihilate what it seeks in the moment of contact. The moment of contact is, indeed, an impossible one, stretched between desire and melancholic lamentation. Nonetheless, the discourse of culture- as-continuity is the very site at which a concern with cultural patrimony becomes an anxiety about national reproductivity and normative sexuality.

Amornwit Nakornthap observes that educational reform movements appear (and disappear) in Thailand at times of political instability.21 Dur- ing King Chulalongkorn's reign, education was consciously pursued and bureaucratically institutionalized as a means of stabilizing the nascent nation and overcoming potentially disruptive regionalism.22 In this context, the unusually public (indeed quite unprecedented) position of the Ratchabat Institute against homosexuality may reflect a historically unique moment of political transformation. The correlation of school reform with the recent emergence of a visible Sinothai ethnicity and a northern cultural regionalism, with mass demands for democratization, with the cease- less border crossings of refugees, and with new forms of transnational capital displacing local elites cannot be incidental. However, the centrality of sexuality in the educational institution's discourses of anxiety reflects more than a generic nostalgia for patriarchal family values. It is premised on the assumption that homosexuality poses a threat to the state; indeed, it renders homosexuality the spectral figure of antinationalism in general. Such a vilification of homosexuality, and especially gay male sexuality, will ultimately be seen as the effort of a threatened state to shore up a mode of nationalism premised, as Benedict Anderson, George Mosse, and, in a different way, Michel Foucault have all argued, on a kind of homosociality that radically opposes itself to the improprieties of a sexualized fraternity as part of its own self-legitimation.23 However, although the ethical embrace of repudiated homoerotic practices can form the basis of liberatory projects in those contexts where they are indeed disavowed, this is not always or simply the case. One of the questions to be explored in the Thai context concerns the degree to which transnational discourses on sex and sexuality, which were originally articulated as part of a soli- daristic politics with local sex radicalism, may have ironically helped to incite the national culturalist reactions that radical Thais now lament.

Two main currents of phantasmic projection can be discerned in the popular discourses on Thailand that emanate from outside of that coun-

Rosalind C. Morris

try. Each embodies one dimension of the conflicted and compulsively repetitious stereotypy that is Orientalism. The first of these imagines Thailand to be a place of beautiful order and orderly beauty. This is the imagination that finds itself most bluntly articulated in the saccharine vision of touristic postcards and official state propaganda: the "Land of Smiles"; the laissez-faire accommodations of may pen rai (it doesn't matter) and sanuk (fun), all of which have been elevated to the status of key symbols in popular anthropologizing. Order and beauty have figures, of course, and these figures become the sites of enormous imaginative and erotic investment while becoming metonymic symbols for a national essence. The figures are familiar enough: beautiful women, saffron-draped monks, baroquely elaborate temples, the king, and monarchical pageantry. In each of these figures is a face in whose ironically simultaneous singu- larity and representativeness the nation is imagined-and images itself-as harmoniously composed, hierarchically ordered, and divinely sanctioned. This then is authenticity's form in Thailand, or, rather, in the image of Thailand as a never-colonized state. Coupled with the insistence on extra- colonial authenticity is the imagination of Thailand as a place responsive to all desire, a plastic domain of polymorphous pleasure where anything can be made to happen and where the hard laws of sexual difference are in suspense. Omnipresent in sex-tour guidebooks and web page adver- tisements, as well as in the invisible circuits of rumor that accompany the traffic in bodies, this latter quality has also been central in transnational gay imaginations of the country. In them, the ambiguity that stereotypy seeks endlessly to contain has been valorized and understood as a mode of resistance to the identitarian oppositions between hetero- and homosexuality which dominate in modern Western contexts.

This embrace of ambiguity has tended to focus on what has often been represented as the Thai institution of a "third sex," called kathoey. Indeed, trans-national gay discourses have often interpreted the category of kathoey as evidence of a specifically Thai valorization of ambiguity. As a consequence, Thailand has been positioned as the kingdom of ante- or perhaps even antisexuality, a place unencumbered by the normativizing demands by which acts are made to speak the (normal or abnormal) truth of an identity concealed at the heart of a subject. With other cultural formations in which third sexes are thought to be present, Thailand has become the exemplary Other.24 Such othering projects frequently deploy third sexes and third genders as rhetorical foils, to theorize or even to exemplify the point at which categorical instability is introduced into systems of otherwise static binary opposition. It is unclear, however, whether such ostensibly "third" categories operate similarly in different contexts or to what extent they can serve as the fulcrum of cultural translation. For this reason, a closer look at Thailand's kathoey is necessary.

Educating Desire 61

(Mis)translating Kathoey: Against Queer Utopias

In Thailand, kathoey is a mode of identification that is usually represented in English as "transgender" and/or "transsexual," but which has historically meant a mode of feminized maleness. Although technical definitions of kathoey refer to doubled or ambiguous genitalia, the term mainly signifies a kind of institutionalized male-to-female crossing-which may or may not entail chemical or surgical transformation.25 Within the increasingly "butch" world of Thai gay subculture, kathoey is also being used to designate effeminate gay men. The trajectories of this category and the possibilities for subjectivity within it have changed radically over the last thirty years, as Thailand has been submerged in transnational discourses dominated by a hetero/homosexual binary. However, my own analysis leads me to conclude that kathoey does not exist in a relation of transgressive exteriority to some prior, already sedimented or otherwise natu- ralized binarity. In the origin myths that circulated in the northern parts of Thailand (Lanna and Lao, where kathoeys have been most consistently remarked in the historical records) prior to the actual crystallizations of the Thai state, the category of the kathoey is represented as primordially human.26 However, insofar as it is an historically existent category-and not just some mythic or ideological figuration-kathoey has probably never entailed the disruption of the male/female binary. It has been con- tained within and, I would suggest, has indeed been the containment of, maleness. Those who are recognized from birth as females do not, generally, become kathoeys. For women, nonreproductivity must find other forms and sites of expression, very few of which are institutionally visible.

Despite the widely remarked labors of self-constitution that form the basis of being kathoey, the category does not seem to function in an inherently critical manner, as Marjorie Garber, for example, claims is the case for other forms of "thirdness" in other cultural contexts. Writing of trans- vestism in general, Garber claims, "The third is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts in question the idea of one: of identity, self-sufficiency, self-knowledge."27 However, the assumption that the gender performances of kathoeys would necessarily alienate heterosexual binarity and call into question its claims to naturalness is somewhat utopic.

I make this claim somewhat reluctantly (for who wishes to surrender a vision of labile possibility?), and only after considered reflection on my own earlier writing.28 In initial considerations of the history of Thai sex/gender systems, I endorsed a reading of kathoey as a mode of thirdness, although I argued strongly that it had been mainly appropriated by and for masculinity-in the sense that only males were eligible for such


transgression. Upon reconsideration, however, a stronger resistance to the concept of the third seems merited. Indeed, this category appears to the- matize and thereby expel an instability in the masculine that would otherwise threaten its autonomy vis-a-vis the feminine. It is for this reason that kathoeys, though considered "natural" by most Thais, are also the objects of frequently condemning and occasionally violent acts. My own obser- vations lead me to believe that "gay bashing," though uncommon, is on the rise in Thailand and is often directed against kathoeys, who are now read as gay "queens." Similarly, newspaper accounts of police raids on brothels suggest that kathoeys are frequently targeted for harassment. Moreover, this condemnation is often redoubled within the contemporary gay male community, where a newly valorized "butch" masculinity increasingly opposes itself to the effeminacy of kathoeys.29

The force of abjection that informs this occasionally violent disavowal of kathoeys (a disavowal that finds its apogee in the specularization of kathoeys in popular culture) can be usefully read in terms of castration anxiety. That anxiety is also present in language itself. Humans (phu) are differentiated in Thai according to the interiority or exteriority of genitalia. The phuchaay (man) both possesses and is potentially split from that which makes him male, insofar as the signifier of his masculinity is vulnerable to symbolic detachment. Without wanting to suggest a universal applicability for Freudian psychoanalysis, it is worth noting Freud's own (often overlooked) argument that castration anxiety does not work to produce antithetical sexual difference.30 The difference it produces is not that between the masculine and the feminine, but between the masculine and the emasculated. In this context, the anthropologically much- remarked local discourse on men's need for diverse and frequent sexual satisfaction in Thailand may be read as the symptom of a compulsive masculinity, a masculinity for which sexual practice is part of a constant process of staving off dissolution, of insisting on maleness in the face of its possible demise. In Thailand, a maleness not exteriorized would perhaps simply fold back on itself and become not female, but kathoey.

Thus, although it is possible to embrace the abjection signified by the kathoey, there is nothing inherently transgressive in it the category. The embrace itself would constitute an ethically queer performance, would form the basis of a sovereignty and self-valuation forged in risk. But it could only achieve this status if the avowal were understood to be more than mere conformity to an inner or preordained truth. Some kathoeys do theatricalize their performances (in cabaret shows and small-town beauty contests), but for the most part being kathoey in Thailand is a question of "realness," of conforming to a "social nature" that is karmically over- determined. Many Thais-kathoeys and others-speak of this identification

Although it is

possible to

embrace the

abjection signified

by the kathoey,

there is nothing

inherently

transgressive in

it the category.

The embrace itself

would constitute

an ethically queer

performance,

would form the

basis of a

sovereignty and

self-valuation

forged in risk.

Educating Desire 63

as something demanded by a secreted fate, even when they speak of kathoeys as having betrayed the birthright that belongs to all men. Indeed, the ritual of habiliment to which kathoeys submit themselves daily can be understood as an effort to force an identity between being and appearance. Ironically, then, kathoey may be the prototypical modality of gendered identity. It differs from conventional forms of masculinity (and perhaps also femininity) in which the public performances of ideals are disarticulated from private practice and made the only measure of difference. Historically, ideal and even heterosexual masculinity did not prohibit homoeroticism. Transnational queer alliance must therefore look elsewhere, to the domain of ethical practice (of which a critically theatrical performance could be one instance)-rather than that of categorical status-for its ideal partnership.

It is this dimension of ethical practice-what might be called the performed avowal of abjection-that seems to distinguish gay and queer positions. Accordingly, I use the term gay to refer to an identitarian position premised upon the fusion of homoeroticism and public, homosocial intimacy. Queer here refers to forms of practice that are transgressive of prohibition but irreducible to social identity. It may be the case that gayness constitutes an especially apt, although certainly not exclusive ground for queer practice; but gayness and queerness are analytically distinguish- able. Ethical transgression is not immediately translatable. It is clearly possible in Thailand to be abjectly kathoey and homoerotically heterosexual.

Attending the normative demand for performative affirmations of masculinity is the rhetoric of variety-which usually distills into crude assertions of men's relative need for sexual multiplicity.31 The seeming polymorphousness of Thai men's sexual activity has often been read, by both envious and moralizing outsiders, as a kind of freedom. This freedom is said to be as apparent in the practices of concubinage as in male- to-male homoeroticism, and it is a point of enthralled identification for gay and straight men around the globe. However, a sexual polymorphousness born of what is perceived to be need, as it is in this context (where remarks upon the bodily demands to which men are subject are as common in bars as in popular psychology texts), represents something quite other than the sovereign pursuit of pleasure and value that a queer transgression entails. The effort to find in Thailand an exemplary site of transnational queer alliance may therefore require some more serious and skeptical scrutiny. There are, I suggest, two issues at stake. The first is the relationship between erotic freedom and the freedom to pursue other forms of intimacy. While the former has historically been available to men in Thai- land, the latter is increasingly constrained by institutions of subjectiviza- tion such as the Ratchabat Institute. The second and related issue


concerns the ways in which sexual freedom has come to stand in for what Michel Foucault calls, more generally, cultural freedom, in the transnational gay imaginary.

By cultural freedom, Foucault means a capacity to create and to create in ways that are not yet known in the moment that they are begun and not isomorphic with the identity of the creator.32 Lost in the moment that sexual freedom is conflated with cultural freedom is the realization that an erotics not yet attached to intense and public intimacies has relatively few radical significations in Thailand. Thus, what has been embraced for its transgressive potential by transnational gay activists is ironically accom- modated by normative masculinity in Thailand. In contrast, what emerges as a radical possibility is the fusion of eroticism and public intimacy. There is enormous risk attending such publicness, however, the extremity of which becomes apparent when one considers the weight of conventional discourses surrounding the crisis of sia naa, or "losing face."33

Losing face, a ubiquitous fear and an omnipresent threat for most Thais, is precisely what happens when something that is deemed more appropriately private (like sex) is exposed in public. "Face" is, of course, a discourse of the gaze, a mode of disciplinarity in which subjects secure their autonomy through the careful display of proper behavior without, at the same time, making any claim for the identity between essence and appearance. Under the regime of "face," proper behavior need not signify anything about intention or inner thoughts. In this sense, the gendered performances of kathoeys might well be understood as the compulsive acts of those whose very condition of being is that of eternal and violent exposure. From within dominant ideology, kathoeys have always already lost face and they must therefore make of this loss a spectacle. Any recu- peration of this specularized abjection will then involve a decision to avow it, to embrace it, and to make of it a matter of sovereign decision.

One must be careful here, in discussing the concept of "face," not to repeat Orientalist notions, which read it as a kind of duplicity. The absence of identity is not yet dissimulation. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to ignore altogether a discourse that is both prevalent and deeply moving for individuals who are subjected to it. Insofar as sexuality (as identity) rests on the demand for transparency between being and act, it constitutes a form of subjectivity deeply at odds with the principles of "face." And in this context, displays of public homosocial intimacy that willingly signify homoeroticism are radical refusals of "face's" discipline. They are potentially celebratory evasions of shame. Given that the disciplinary force of "face" has historically been mobilized in the interest of cultural nationalism in Thailand, it is also possible that queerness in Thai- land carries within itself the power to trouble not merely the state of individual images, but the state of Thailand itself.

Educating Desire 65

Foucauldian Fantasies: From Eroticism to Intimacy

At stake in this discussion are the politics of intimacy. It is not simply that the affront of a forbidden public intimacy has such irritant power that it can threaten the state's claim on performance. Rather, I am suggesting that such displays become subversive of patriarchal nationalism (at least in Thailand) when they come to index an eroticized homosociality and in that moment reveal the lie of that "passionate fraternity"34 by which modern nationalism operates. This subversiveness is not to be read in the mode of a developmental and even less of a teleological movement, where radicalism is synonymous with the appearance of Western forms of subjectivity and representation. Being inserted into the global imaginary has, of course, effected changes in Thailand that can retroactively appear to have a developmental quality. But these are not immanent by any means. The point is that, at present, assertions of nonnormative identity can and do disrupt the surface of state-propagated notions of ideal Thai-ness in their refusal of that surface's autonomy. Categories of subjective identity are under threat in Euro-American contexts as the residue of an Enlight- enment sensibility, the radically individuated self being no longer appro- priate to, or sustainable within, the multifaceted economies of late capitalism. However, while they seem at odds with ethically queer positions in the West, they can actually constitute a form of queer practice in Thai- land. This is because the political and symbolic economies of nationalist modernity in Thailand have made visibility the locus of both value and truth. The decreasing power of "face" as a disciplinary discourse, which echoes in the lamentations of elders who believe their children to be "shameless," marks this trend and imbues it with an odd combination of pathos and vivacity. "Realness" is less and less a question of performed ideals and more and more a matter of inner truths made visible.

The transnational flows in which gay and queer activists have fum- blingly sought their objects of desire and found subjects of alliance are centuries old, and the modern nation-state itself is a symptom of those circuits.35 One can yet say, however, that the ironically nostalgic desire (on the part of transnational gay activists) for a misinterpreted erotic plastic- ity has had a particularly propulsive force in the more recent processes by which an identitarian sexuality has begun to emerge in Thailand. To help explicate both the histories within which public intimacy has come to signify a potentially extra- or even ironically antinational erotics, and to reveal the ways in which transnational gay desire has been implicated in that history, I would like to consider two very different texts, one written in the 1930s by Thai novelist and national literary heroine, K. Surang-


khanang,36 and one written in the 1990s by contemporary gay activist and theorist of Thai sexuality, Peter Jackson. Their works concern widely dis- parate subject matter: K. Surankhanang's Prostitute (Ying Khon Chua) tells the story of a young woman destroyed by society and made to live and die by sexual labor, while Jackson's Intrinsic Quality of Skin37 narrates the sexual explorations of an Australian gay man who seeks in Thailand the object of both his desire and his ideal identification. They also differ in tone. The Prostitute follows the melodramatic conventions of tales of fallen women and adds to them the poignancy and dross of eighteenth-century European realism. The Intrinsic Quality of Skin is a sex-travelogue attired in the forms of ethnography with romantic gestures toward epic self-discovery. Despite their differences, the juxtaposition of these two novels permits a telescoped vision of the stakes that public intimacy entails in both the Thai nationalist and the transnational gay imaginaries.

The narrative of The Prostitute is framed as a conversation between two men who meet on a train and exchange news of people they have known. One of the men is a wealthy businessman from Thailand's south, and the other is an army captain; together they represent Bangkokian power in the period immediately following the deposing of the absolute monarchy. Opening in this setting of the train, which operates as the quintessential signifier of modernity in this period, the novel both reflects the moment of high nationalism that is its context and thematizes that discourse as a conversation between men. That conversation rests on the production of a cloistered private sphere against which the public space of the modern bureaucratic state defines itself.

The two men relate the story of a young man named Wit, but the story quickly focuses on an up-country village woman whom Wit encounters during an evening of debauched pleasure seeking. Her name is Wahn, and she has come to Bangkok with a stranger (Wichai) who has seduced her, taken her to the capital, and then abandoned her to his aunt, a brothel matron named Ba Taht. Having been fully interpellated as a sexual subject in the moment of her first sexual experience, Wahn has mistaken pleasure for love. It is an error that makes her incapable of navigating the world of Bangkokian-which is to say urban-modernity.

In the Bangkok brothel, however, she meets and falls in love with the young bourgeois hero who initially reciprocates her love and promises marriage, but who then abandons her without ever learning that she is pregnant by him. Her friend and confidant at the brothel, a young but more worldly woman named Samorn, advises abortion, but Wahn, who has now changed her name to Reun,38 refuses. In order to protect her friend and her friend's new daughter from the degradations of prostitution, Samorn arranges a series of menial jobs for Reun. As the commer-

Educating Desire 67

cialization of domestic work, these jobs are the flip side of an economy that monetizes sexual relations. Predictably these jobs fail, but rather than permit Reun to return to the brothel, Samorn moves in with her, assum- ing the role of "husband": "Samorn acted as if she were the man of the house," and Reun "looked after Samorn as a wife would a husband."39 Although the relationship is never explicitly sexualized, Reun and Samorn develop a tender and mutually caring partnership in which they worry for each other's futures and suffer together the outrages that fate has given them. In many regards, the two appear to adopt what would now be read as a thom-dii (butch-femme) relationship, but in the novel the women's erotic life remains oblique. This is not because homosex has no place in The Prostitute. Earlier in the novel, there is an explicit scene of male-to- male homoeroticism, albeit one that is given to us through the eyes of Wahn (before the name change) in a moment of traumatic realization. Wahn encounters two men through a peephole in the wall of the brothel, initially disbelieving and then cognizant that this "was not a picture of two young lovers, nor was it as if they were husband and wife."40 She turns away horrified by what this vision may portend about her own future. A textual ellipsis performs the aporia that is trauma, and the chapter breaks, giving way immediately to the scene in which Wahn is informed of the demands that will be made of her at the brothel. There, all sex will become violent and devoid of intimacy precisely because the brothel is the publicization of sex, the transportation of sex into an inappropriately visible domain. The peephole signifies this improper visibility, and the ellipsis reiterates the sense of crisis that issues from it. Sex is unspeakable here because the brothel is only illusorily private. "If things turned out as she feared, then there would be nothing but .. . .41 The only source of resistance to this condition is then the solidary community between women and the fragile intimacies, like that between Wahn/Reun and Samorn, which survive between the prostitutes.

It is perhaps not surprising that both women would die before novel's end. Samorn falls first, forcing Reun to return to prostitution and to hand her child over to a neighbor couple who agree to raise her. Back at the brothel, her body wasting, Reun encounters her long-lost love, soon enough to inform him who she is (he does not recognize her) and to hear him accept responsibility for the child's upbringing. Wit is not to play Reun's savior, however. Like Samorn, she collapses and dies as he, the now properly married man, comes to fetch the child he shall raise.

Despite the melodramatic predictability of the plot, the novel is imbued with a far richer and more ambivalent significance than may seem to be the case at first sight. Translated as "the prostitute," ying khon chua also means "bad women" and is often synonymous in Thai with ying san-

Rosalind C. Morris

chonrok, meaning "women who convey contagious diseases."42 It is, of course, ironic that both Reun and Samorn would themselves become victims rather than vectors of illness, but the disease conveyed by Reun and Samorn is also that of a solidarity that will not be rationalized in the service of the patriarchal community's well-being. Their intimacy is the counterpoint to that masculine homosociality which enframes them and sustains the nation, and insofar as it threatens to become public it also threatens the nation with dis-ease. And it is for this transgression, as much as for any sexual sin, that their death is logically demanded. At the end of the novel, K. Surangkhanang's narrator recites what has become a verita- ble leitmotiv of the novel, the epigrammatic proverb, "Sin it is that has to support virtue."43 Here, the author echoes the sentiment of her liberal Thai contemporaries, many of whom were writing for women's journals and attacking the socioeconomic conditions that made prostitution not only possible but likely in the public spaces newly consecrated to the now- constitutionalized nation.44 Thus framed, on the one end by a conversation between two privileged men and on the other by the author's ethico- political commentary, the story of Reun and Samorn implicitly implicates the male narrators and the urban modernity that they represent by suggesting that the facade of public morality so intrinsic to the discourses of nationalist modernity not only occludes, but rests upon, a deeper-and deeply violent-injustice. Moreover, it rests on the sequestering of the sexual.

Ironically, it will be precisely the invisibility of the sexual that makes anonymity possible for Western travelers in the decades following the publication of The Prostitute. However, this invisibility is not the lack of presence; it is, rather, the lack of signification attached to otherwise apparent instances of erotic practice. In The Intrinsic Quality of Skin homoeroticism is the means to an intimacy that stands as the Other of patriarchal fraternity, but the pleasures of invisibility prove too seductive to permit the full realization of intimacy's radical possibility.

In Jackson's novel the narrator's first experience of sexual contact between men leads him into a reverie in which he fantasizes both that he should have been born Thai and that he has always been Thai. Thai-ness is made synonymous with sexual freedom, but it is the specific kind of freedom permitted by nonidentitarian subject formations. Things are possible and exciting in their possibilities for the narrator because they do not signify in the way that they would in Australia, the narrator's home country. Like many Western gay men who have spent the better part of their lives in the crippling confines of the closet, the narrator of The Intrinsic Quality of Skin finds in Thailand a sense of security in anonymity and a world of virtually limitless erotic possibility. He watches laborers bathing

Educating Desire 69

in public space and marvels at the voyeuristic pleasures that everyday life affords him by virtue of Thai men's willingness to grant each other the illusions of privacy. Unable to relinquish the language of his origins, the narrator discovers the relief of being "like a felon in a city where crime is the norm."45 He has found the brothel without walls. Quick upon the heels of this discovery, he finds himself in a relationship with a young man who picks him up at a train station urinal. Unlike The Prostitute, Jackson's novel makes the train station a site of both instability and decay, and therefore of romantic association. The narrator is not aroused by what he perceives to be the sordidness of the encounter. Rather, he is excited by the strangeness of the "sexual" encounter itself, by the fact that it doesn't entail "fucking" and that it allows him to discover a much broader erotogenicity in himself. As if attempting to realize the tale of Foucault's postrepresentational utopia, the first pages of The Intrinsic Quality of Skin are full of the amazement that the narrator feels when he discovers in his young lover a completely dispersed erotogenicity. Wiset, the young lover, is not shackled to genital sex. Instead, his skin is a volatile and sponta- neously responsive zone, randomly sensitive to any touch.46 Indeed, Wiset is referred to in the novel as, quite simply, a "randomness."

Wiset's embodiment of a postrepresentational erotics, which would seemingly ally itself with queer politics, is both affirmed and undercut when he refuses the protagonist's invitation to a more permanent domestic relationship. Domesticity is, for him, prohibited. It would constitute feminization, both to the extent that he would inhabit the role of depen- dent and that his own capacity to pursue other, diverse pleasures would be undermined. What promised salvation to Reun and Samorn is damnation for Wiset. Domesticity cannot signify homoeroticism for the two women, but it risks precisely that signification for men. And so Wiset affirms his masculinity in a gesture that immediately reencompasses what, for his Western lover, had been a felony, by rendering erotic multiplicity as a necessary dimension of his maleness. Crucially, the identificatory processes entailed by domestication are those that carry the real risk for Wiset. Sexual desire in itself has no political currency for him.

Jackson's novel is not without ethnographic basis. In my own conver- sations with young gay men and lesbians, this same emphasis upon the risks of domesticity has been acutely present, though for different reasons. For the women, sexual agency in the public domain is already transgressive, and the refusal of a reproductive domesticity is potentially antinational. For men, domesticity is transgressive, and public intimacy is its most flagrantly visible form. Not concerned with sex so much as with the ways in which their relationships will be perceived by family and community members, the decision to enact public intimacy has frequently been described to me as the most demanding, the most painful, and the most politically dangerous undertaking a person can conceive.

Rosalind C. Morris

The Intrinsic Quality of Skin assumes its significance because Jackson is the primary scholar of male homosexuality in Thailand and his fiction is informed by the dominant discourses of transnational gay alliance. With Eric Allyn, Jackson has written more than anyone else on the topic, and the two men have coauthored an influential essay on the history of Thai sexuality, which appeared in the revised edition of Jackson's Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand.47 In that article, they put forward a hypothesis to explain the historical transformation of Thai sex/gender systems and the recent emergence of an overtly identitarian gay movement. Both Jackson and Allyn want to insist on an indigenous tradition of homosexuality in Thailand, but one which largely excludes kathoeys-whom they believe provided sexual outlets for "heterosexual" men in circumstances where access to women was otherwise limited. I have elsewhere indicated my disagreement with this "safety-valve" theory of kathoey identity.48 In the present context, I want only to emphasize the ambivalence in Jackson's and Allyn's accounts regarding the simultaneous difference between Western and Thai sexual practice and the emphatic maleness that serves as the ground for cross-cultural liaison. Allyn himself wrote the widely consumed sex-tour guidebook, Trees in the Same Forest,49 and he shares Jackson's conviction that sexual life is organized "differently" in Thailand. In Trees, he provides a lexicon of sexual terms through which to negotiate this difference, offering assurances as he does so that the rudi- mentary vocabulary of sexual gesture provides insight into the workings of the culture from which it derives.

Allyn's privileging of the sexual as the location of cultural truth (and not merely subjective truth) repeats a long tradition in both popular and academic anthropology (itself a symptom of modernity), but it passes by the radical possibility entailed in the moment that eroticism becomes attached to public intimacy. This very "passing" (by) drives the narrator of The Intrinsic Quality of Skin to fantasize himself Thai and to find refuge in the anonymity of a city where his "crime" has become unrecognizable. Such anonymity is precisely what the Ratchabat Institute longs for.

Through violent disavowal, the institute's policy recognizes the radicalism of an eroticism bound to public intimacy. It discerns the difference between the kind of public bodily affection (mutual caressing, hand-hold- ing, and simpler proximity) traditionally deemed normal between men and between women and the public, erotically invested intimacy that is tied to (homo)sexual identity. It discerns and thereby institutes that difference in a prohibition whose performative power lies not in its "repression" of any behavior but in its incitement to identification. It is in this context that the Institute's reports of crime must be considered. The talk about sex is not, in the end, talk about sex (or not merely about sex) so much as it is talk about what sex and especially homosex signifies and what it threatens. Amid the specularization of sexual acts-and here I

Through violent

disavowal, the

Ratchabat

Institutes

policy recognizes

the radicalism

of an eroticism

bound to

public intimacy

Educating Desire 71

would include that ironic specularization that is rumor-the concern is not simply with pederasty but with the "reproduction" of same-sex intimacy among students.

Once again, Michel Foucault's work provides guidance. In one of his characteristically insightful moves, Foucault pointed out that state institutions organized as permanent kinds of fraternity, such as schools, armies, police forces, and even clerical orders, become the sites of anxiety when the possibility of intense and exclusively reciprocal friendships arise.50 If the nation requires a "passionate fraternity," it nonetheless requires also the chastening of passion. This intimacy may therefore be countered with the insertion of phantasmatically feminine Others against, and through whom, the communities operate. But mainly, it is obviated through "tech- niques of the self," which include everything from confession to daily exercise and the pursuit of wellness (increasingly popular in Bangkok and Chiang Mai).51 Needless to say, intense and eroticized friendships are not encouraged in institutions whose aim is to produce subjects of the state, subjects who can be called upon to exercise force over, or to with- hold care from, each other. It is interesting to note, then, that when the army and border patrol police opened fire on civilian democracy protes- tors in 1992, the most ubiquitous expression of horror concerned the fact that Thais had assaulted Thais in the name of the state. Although couched in racialist terms (and in this regard the 1992 assault differed from earlier state violence in that it was not directed against ethnic Sinothais), the outrage also paid heed to the fact that the country's educational apparatus (including its military and civilian branches) had managed to interpellate subjects for whom the claims of community could no longer disrupt the demands of state.

Signs and Portents: Prohibition before the Ratchabat Institute

It is now possible to see that homosexual domesticity and public homosocial intimacy would pose a threat to many Thais who have been educated in a national educational system (as it does for Wiset in Jackson's novel and for all of Thai society in Surangkhanang's text). Indeed, an archaeo- logical analysis makes it possible to recognize that the apparent sudden- ness of the Ratchabat Institute's policy is false. The policy is merely the official extension of an emergent discourse that responds to new gay activism by pathologizing homosexuality. A psychologistically dominated discourse on "sexual deviance," much of it suggesting a correlation between homosexuality and criminality, began to appear first in the


1960s.52 Although it is by no means hegemonic, this discourse is not con- fined to the halls and journals of therapeutic discipline. In popular maga- zines such as Plaek (Strange), advice columns feature innumerable and repetitive letters in which young men (and occasionally women) ask for clarity regarding their sexual identities in the way of unexpected same-sex pleasure.53 Often, these letters express a poignant sense of crisis and a perceived need to submit to an identity that was heretofore unknown to them. Columnists invariably respond in the role of the patriarchal father by naming such letter writers either gay or not, sometimes designating them as "kings" or "queens," while reserving the possibility of a sovereign masculinity for those men who have not assumed receptive roles in sexual encounters.

The deep urgency that inhabits these letters, now widely distributed in public space, seems to stem from the relatively recent emergence of a public discourse on homosexuality. But in their articulations of confusion, rather than fear, and in their submissions that are not yet appropriations, the letter writers seek both stability in naming and something more. That something more includes an identificatory field that will bind them to others, giving them access to new forms of comradeship and new uni- verses of sociality. Thus, while the act of naming domesticates subjects as gay or lesbian, as kings or queens, it also ruptures the domestic domain of bourgeois nationalism, which explodes into the public with a new transparency. That such change is bound up with the forces of transnationalism cannot be denied. The Thai phrase for homosexuality, rak ruam phet, is rarely used in colloquial speech. Much more common are the translit- eration of homosexual, homosekchuan, and the English-derived gai. To say that "gayness" is a foreign agent is, however, to miss the point. What is at stake here is not a unidirectional movement, nor a vectoral exchange by which Thailand has become the yielding receptacle for Euro-American and Australian cultural infusions. The relation is, to use Erni's term, a redoubled one. In the moment that the Thai state enacts a prohibition against homosexuals, it embraces the very terms by which it claims to have been threatened.

Needless to say, nostalgia for a moment in which homoerotic acts were not yet prohibited-because they did not signify publicly-cannot suffice for a time in which they are. For gays and lesbians in Thailand, the question now is not how to turn back time, although the revocation of the Ratchabat Institute's policy is clearly imperative, but how to resist the normativizing demands of sexuality in new ways. To take on the risks of public intimacy and refuse losing face, to pursue friendships, to explore pleasure beyond sex: these are the (potentially democratic) acts of radicalism that now call Thai activists.

Educating Desire 73

There is a sense in which the discourses on sex and sexuality in Thai-

land share the deep ambivalences that run through Foucault's own work

on the topic. Like his writings, they are riven by two seemingly contradic-

tory tendencies-namely, the tendency toward systematization and the

Nietzschean-inspired desire for a transgression that can mark power's limit and constitute the disruption of its order. In this essay I have drawn

heavily on the arguments in The History of Sexuality, especially on those

that refuse the "repression hypothesis,"54 because they seem to offer the

most fecund possibilities for reading the transformations that have come

to bear on Thailand. Foucault's claim that state efforts at prohibition have,

historically, served mainly to elicit and clarify and, indeed, to summon

into being the very objects against which its legislative acts are directed, carries with it a demand for ethically vigilant reflexivity. That reflexivity must consider the ways that historiography itself enters into these histor-

ical relations, and the degree to which radical or recuperative histories

become enmeshed in the discursive circuits by which modernity is real-

ized. This is especially true in those contexts where the analytic project seeks to traverse the extremely uneven space between transnational move-

ments and local social realities. This paper has been born of an effort to realize the ethical demand

implicit in Foucault's work, and has been everywhere underscored by the

need to visit my earlier attempts to respond, with solidarity, to the courage and the cultural creativity of radical Thais. Part of this return to earlier

work has entailed a realization that efforts at solidarity can become ironi-

cally implicated in global formations, wherein antithetical projects have the

upper hand. One needs to be aware of the degree to which the conse-

quences of these discursive flows are irreversible. However, although their

effects have sometimes been made to stabilize local structures that are

now dominated by antihomosexual sentiment, they also open onto fields

of possible resistance. The forms of that resistance will be creatively deter-

mined, by Thais. In the end, one hopes that they will induce a sensibility in which the Ratchabat Institute's ban on homosexual students can be

shocking, again.

Notes

I would like to recognize and thank several people who read this essay in earlier drafts and provided generously critical comments. They are Yvette Christianse, David Eng, Phillip Brian Harper, Dorothy Hodgson, Bruce Robbins, and Dorothea von Mucke. Regrettably, not all of their suggestions have been accom- modated here, and all errors remain my own exclusive responsibility. Nonethe- less, my debt of gratitude is enormous.


1. The story of the Ratchabat Institute's prohibition was widely circulated in the Thai press, but received its direct criticism mainly in the English-language dailies, the Nation and the Bangkok Post (both of which are widely read by members of the upper middle class). See, for example, Sanitsuda Ekachai, "Com- mentary," Bangkok Post, 2 January 1997.

2. The Spartacus International Gay Guide (ed. John Stamford [Amsterdam: Spartacus, 1980]), for example, describes Thailand as "a gay and tourist paradise ... it offers the finest sight-seeing in Asia, and with such warm, friendly, happy people and such handsome young men it is a Mecca for gays" (502). For criticism of the Spartacus guide, and an ironically ambivalent reassessment of the question of homosexual identity in Thailand, see Peter A. Jackson, Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand (Bangkok: Bua Luang, 1995), esp. 11-15. (This is a revised edition of Jackson's earlier book, Male Homosexuality in Thailand: An Interpretation of Contemporary Thai Sources [New York: Global Academic Pub- lishers, 1989]).

3. The argument about the productivity of discourse, which stands in direct opposition to the understanding of prohibition as repression, belongs to Michel Foucault. See especially The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: Vintage, 1978).

4. Sirikul Bunnag and Ampa Santimatanedol, "Sukavich: I Won't Lift Ban on Gays," Bangkok Post, 22 January 1997.

5. Sukavich is quoted as having said, "I will not lift the ban on gays for teaching jobs. How can we change it for only a few people? They [human rights groups] should think about the future of young people, not simply cite human rights violations as reasons to demand the lifting of the ban" (ibid.).

6. The political history of modern Thailand is a topic far too broad for con- sideration in this essay, although the emergence of democratic forms clearly provides the context within which this essay has become possible and, I hope, necessary. A few crucial texts in this field are as follows: Benedict Anderson, "Studies of the Thai State: The State of Thai Studies," in The Study of Thailand: Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches to and Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science, ed. Eliezer B. Ayal (Athens: Ohio Uni- versity Center for International Studies), 193-247; Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thai- land: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Bangkok: Social Science Association of Thailand and the Thai Khadi Institute, Thammasat University, 1979); Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of the Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); and Pasuk Phongpaichit and Sungsidh Piriyarangsan, Corruption and Democracy in Thailand (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1996). For an account of the history of capitalization associated with democratization, see Akira Suehiro's excellent Capital Accumulation in Thailand, 1855-1985 (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1989).

7. These groups include Anjaree, the Women's Foundation, the Women's Friends Foundation, Women's Home, Empower, and the Union of Civil Liberties (Bunnag and Santimatanedol, "Sukavich").

8. Daily newspapers devote dozens of column inches to questions of repre- sentational practices, the distribution of decision-making authority, the relationship between the military and electoral politics, whether or not a prime minister should be an appointed or an elected official, and so forth.

9. In this context, it is significant that the Vocational Education Department, also under the Ministry of Education, acted in early 1997 to prohibit drug addicts

Educating Desire 75

from enrolling in vocational programs. Opposition to the decision followed in many of the same quarters that opposed the ban on homosexual teachers. See, for example, the editorial of the Siam Post, reprinted in Bangkok Post, 21 March 1997.

10. Hans-Deiter Bechstedt, "Identity and Authority in Thailand," in National Identity and Its Defenders: Thailand, 1939-1989, ed. Craig J. Reynolds (Chiang Mai: Silkworm, 1991), 303. Also see L. Liebig-Hundius, "Thailand's Lehrer zwishchen 'Tradition' und 'Fortshcritt,"' Eine empirische Untersuchung- politiisch-sozialier und paedagogischer Einstellungen thailaendischer Lehrerstudentent des Jahres 1974 (Wiesbaden: 1984), 67; and H. P. Phillips, Thai Peasant Personal- ity: The Patterning of Interpersonal Behavior in the Village of Bang Chan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965).

11. I use the notion of screen image in a loosely Freudian sense, but with ref- erence to the concepts of spectacle developed elsewhere by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1994). Following Freud's concept as developed in The Interpretation of Dreams ([1900], trans. James Strachey [New York: Avon, 1967]), I use screen image to mean that visible symptom which is at once the transformation of, and the obstacle to, a prior scene of trauma or crisis. The screen image, in its more general sense, is also that image whose overvaluation or "overexposure" serves to blind its beholder to the logic that it displays. It is a kind of display that conceals, produc- ing the blindness of thrall.

12. Ekachai, "Commentary." 13. Implicitly, Sanitsuda is referring to the elaborate systems of relative

social status by which individuals must constantly relate to one another. In popular terms, this form of diffuse hierarchy is referred to as a principle of phii/nomg (literally, "elder/younger sibling"), which forms the paradigm for fluid and relative social relations between people of the same general social category. This form of intimate hierarchy, which permeates friendships and marriages, remains a potent force in Thailand, despite its attenuation in recent years. It is also inte- grated with a more severe kind of debt patronage that, while residual of the sakdii naa system (something comparable with but not identical to feudalism), continues to underscore political structures. It is this "loose" organizational principle, to use J. F Embree's term, that informs the system of superordination and subordination so prevalent in schools, where students are generally forbidden to criti- cize teachers and teachers have relatively unimpeded authority. See J. F. Embree, "Thailand, a Loosely Structured Social System," in Loosely Structured Social Sys- tems: Thailand in Comparative Perspective, ed. Hans-Deiter Evers, Cultural Report Series, no. 17 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); C. J. Reynolds, Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987).

14. The term ideoscape is drawn from Arjun Appadurai's typology of transnational media formations and refers to the domain of ideology. See "Dis- juncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 27-47.

15. On this period in Thailand see David Morell and Chai-anan Samuda- vanija, Political Conflict in Thailand: Reform, Reaction, Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn, and Hain, 1981); Thak Chaloemtiarana, Thailand: The Politics of Despotic Paternalism (Bangkok: Social Science Association of Thai-


land and Thai Khadi Institute, Thammasat University, 1979); and Katherine Bowie, Rituals of National Identity: An Anthropology of the State and the Village Scout Movement in Thailand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

16. Amornwit Nakornthap, "Giving the Children What They Need," Bangkok Post, 19 March 1997.

17. Chai-anan Samudavanija, "State-Identity Creation, State Building, and Civil Society, 1939-1989," in Reynolds, National Identity and Its Defenders, 59-86.

18. Rosalind C. Morris, "Three Sexes and Four Sexualities: Redressing the Discourses on Sexuality and Gender in Contemporary Thailand," positions 2.1 (1994): 15-43.

19. John Nguyet Erni, "Of Desire, the Farang, and Textual Excursions: Assembling 'Asian AIDS,"' Cultural Studies 11.1 (1997): 65. Erni is here referring to a passage in Homi Bhabha's "Commitment to Theory," in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). The text reads as follows: "The language of critique . . . opens up a space of translation: a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object that is new, neither one nor the other, properly alienates our political expectations, and changes as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of politics" (25; original emphasis).

20. The echo of Walter Benjamin is here intentional. See "Thesis 8," in "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt (London: Fontana, 1973), 248.

21. Nakornthap, "Children." 22. On the subject of education and nationalist modernity in Thailand, see

David K. Wyatt, The Politics of Reform in Thailand: Education in the Reign of King Chulalongkorn (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969).

23. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). For an overview of this argument and an introduction to the works of those, like Lee Edelman and Jonathan Goldberg, who argue for the historically subversive forces of homoeroticism in national and protonational contexts, see Andrew Parker et al., introduction to Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992), 1-18.

24. An abundant literature has been addressed to cultures of third sexes, including those of North America and India where the berdache and the hijra, respectively, are seen to play the inherently destabilizing part of liminal figures. For a critical survey of the anthropological literature, see Cath Weston, "Lesbian and Gay Studies in the House of Anthropology," Annual Review of Anthropology 22 (1993): 339-67. A more varied set of addresses to the issue can be canvassed in Gilbert Herdt, ed., Third Sex/Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Cul- ture and History (New York: Zone, 1994).

25. "Kathoey," in Sanarukrom Thai chapab Ratchabanditthauasathan [The Royal Institute Thai Encyclopedia], vol. 2 (Bangkok: Rong-phim rung ruang tham, 1956), 810-22. I have also heard reported that the term is used, though rather infrequently, for bearded women.

26. To my knowledge, the only written versions of this origin myth are to be found in Anatole-Roger Peltier, trans., Pathamamulamuli: The Origin of the World in the Lan Na Tradition (Bangkok: Suriwong, 1991).

27. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Crossdressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 11.

Educating Desire 77

28. Morris, "Three Sexes, Four Sexualities." 29. A typical representation of this sentiment can be found in Santi, "Chiwit

ranthot khong kathoey Thai" ["The miserable lives of Thailand's kathoeys"], Bot Bandit 40 (1983): 68-74.

30. Sigmund Freud, "The Infantile Genital Organization: An Interpolation into the Theory of Sexuality," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycholog- ical Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psychoanalysis, 1969), 141-45.

31. It is, for example, the claimed need for sexual diversity that makes men immune to legal charges of adultery. The word adultery cannot, indeed, be used in relation to men, which fact feminists are currently challenging through a demand for constitutional amendment and the redaction of official dictionaries. See Sanitsuda Ekachai, "Adultery Is for Women Only," Bangkok Post, 19 March 1997.

32. This is the modified Nietzschean dimension of Foucault's transgression, one quite irreconcilable with identitarian politics, but one which does, I believe, lay the ground for queer ethics. See Michel Foucault, "Sex, Power, and the Poli- tics of Identity," in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow and trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: Free, 1997), 164.

33. Saenphan Bandit, "Kin Khi, Phi Norn-Khae Nan Reu?" ["Eating, Shitting, Fucking, Sleeping-Is That All?"] Mithuna 10 (1994): 52-55.

34. The term belongs to Anderson, Imagined Communities, 16. 35. I assume here that the nation-state, as an historically localizable entity,

finds its origins in early modern Europe, but that it has become-through the forces of imperialism, transnational capitalism, and other kinds of global traffic- a virtually universal, though still various, political formation in the twentieth century. See Parker et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities.

36. K. Surangkhanang is a pen name for Kanha Watanaphat, and later, Kanha Khiangsri. Although The Prostitute was originally rejected by publishers, K. Surangkhanang assumed monumental status in Thai literature, and the novel is now generally considered part of the modern canon. In 1986 the author was recognized with the title of "national artist" for her contribution to Thai literature, which included more than forty novels and nearly a hundred short stories as well as journalistic pieces. See David Smyth, introduction to The Prostitute [Ying Khon Chua] by K. Surangkhanang, trans. David Smyth (Singapore: Oxford, 1994), v-ix.

37. Peter A. Jackson, The Intrinsic Quality of Skin (Bangkok: Floating Lotus, 1994).

38. In Thai, Wahn means "sweet" and is often a term of affection for children and others who appear innocent. The name change makes visible the shift in Wahn's status and denotes her entry into the sexual economy of prostitution.

39. Surangkhanang, Prostitute, 116. 40. Ibid., 58. 41. Ibid, 58 (ellipses in original). 42. Suwadee Tanaprasitpatana, "Thai Society's Expectations of Women,

1851-1935" (Ph.D. diss., University of Sydney, 1989). 43. Surankhanang, Prostitute, 227. 44. In the mid-1920s, for example, articles sympathetic to prostitutes were

common. On 22 March 1925, Satrithai [Thai Woman] ran a story in which one of its contributing editors wrote that "any woman who has turned to an evil way


of life has done so as a result of her being so badly abused by her man. She is, therefore devoid of love for any men, and, as long as she needs to struggle, her body will do whatever her luck and fate direct her to do." Cited in Suwadee, "Expectations of Women," 218.

45. Jackson, Intrinsic Quality of Skin, 13. 46. Ibid., 36-37. 47. Peter A. Jackson and Eric Allyn, "The Emergence of Thai Gay Identity,"

in Jackson, Dear Uncle Go, 226-82. 48. Rosalind C. Morris, "Review of Dear Uncle Go," Journal of the History of

Sexuality 7 (1996): 299-302. 49. Eric Allyn, Trees in the Same Forest: Thailand's Culture and Gay Subcul-

ture (San Francisco: Bua Luang, 1991); Eric Allyn and Dr. John P. Collins, The Men of Thailand (San Francisco: Bua Luang, 1987).

50. Foucault, "Politics of Identity," 163-217. 51. Foucault, History of Sexuality, esp. vols. 1, An Introduction, and 3, The

Care of the Self, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: Vintage, 1978 and 1986). 52. Some representative Thai-language sources are Bophit Feuangnakhorn,

Rok kamarom [Illness of Sexual Desire] (Bangkok: Samnak-phim Bannakan, 1969); Narongsak Talaphat, Duangman Rerksamran, and Wanchai Chaisit, "Khrop- khrua lae kaan-op-rom liang duu nai wai-dek kap rak-ruam-phet" ["The Family, Child Raising Methods, and the Problem of Homosexuality"], Warasan Jitwithhi- aya Khlinik 8 (April 1977): 24-35; for a less homophobic position, see Seri Won- montha, Sing thii rao khuan ruu kiaw-kap homosekchuan [Things We Should Know about Homosexuals] (Bangkok: Social Welfare Association of Thailand, n.d.).

53. See Peter Jackson's account of these letters in Dear Uncle Go. 54. Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 15-36.

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Educating Desire: Thailand, Transnationalism, Transgression

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