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.

Drones, Cinema, and Protest in Thailand

The drone is defined within the duality of indifference and depersonalization, but also elevates a specific technology of seeing above fluid expressions of collectivity. This chapter addresses the drone as a mechanical device and figurative analogy of clarification that helped to organize ideological divisions into an objective narrative of the 2014 military coup d’état in Thailand. To critique these droned hierarchies, I draw upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of the ‘politics of aesthetics’ to address independent Thai cinema as a regime of ‘fictionality’ where the personalization of protest returns. The fictionality of Prapat Jiwarangsan and Danaya Chulphuthipong, two Thai film-makers, reconfigures the field of protest by extending its duration into an expanded realism of post-coup oppression and resistance.

Tense Harmony: Thai Cinema and Popular Music

This paper follows the development of the special connection between Thai cinema and Thai popular music from the 1920s onward. The main argument is that the two dominant musical styles of luk krung and luk thung have become representative of different social groups within Thailand and that this diversification can also be found in Thai cinema. Luk thung, identified with the rural poor, was mostly rejected by producers and audience during the 1950s and 1960s. Only from the 1970s onward did a cinematic style that represented this sector of Thai society and culture develop. In this sense, one can view Thai cinema as an archive of Thai popular music.