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No Panopticon in Sight at this Sexotic Oriental Beach: Gender and Sexual Minorities Under the Thai Regime of "Positive Images."
Peter Jackson, Research Fellow in Thai History. Division of Pacific and Asian History RSPAS, ANU
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In recent decades the legitimacy of new cultures of gender and sexual minorities in Thailand has been much debated by academics, bureaucrats, medical professionals and politicians. While Thailand has not criminalised homosexuality or transgenderism, since the 1980s there has been much contestation around the public representation of gender/sex minorities in the electronic media. Anxieties centred on the phenomenal popularity of transgendered (Thai: kathoey) characters in Thai television soap operas and the mass appeal of transgendered comedians. In this paper I specify the modalities of power that constrain the public representation of gender/sex difference in Thailand, constrasting the state's disinterest in controlling press representations of homosexuality and transgenderism with the intense anxiety that surrounds the visual imaging of cross-dressing men in the nation's television programs. I interpret this bifurcation in Thailand's regimes of representation in terms of the country's distinctive response to Euro-American imperialisms. I also reflect on the incapacity of a Foucauldian "panoptic" model of power to explain an Asian politico-legal regime that is preoccupied with policing "surface effects" and the circulation of "positive images" of normative gender/sex behaviours, yet is disinterested in enforcing private compliance with those norms.
