Syndromes and a Century: Contemporary Queer Thai Cinema

This chapter concentrates on the conceptual possibilities that new Thai cinema and media open up for how we understand—and inhabit—queer personhood. It draws these films into relation to a wider political context and delineates recent shifts in understandings of sexual personhood in the country. Investigating Thai and Thai-coproduced feature films, documentaries, as well as queer occupations of social media, the article pays special attention to the (nondoctrinal) ways in which Buddhism informs contemporary sexualities. What results are globally informed yet locally rooted models of queerness and transness that take us beyond the dominant liberal models of sexual identity and economic mobility, as trans videos, lesbian films, and queer documentaries model a kind of personhood that is ordinary, though not obedient, and socially central, though not assimilated.