Intersections: Performative Genders, Perverse Desires: A Bio-History of Thailand's Same-Sex and Transgender Cultures

1. In this study I explore an apparent paradox in the history of Thailand's same-sex and transgender cultures. In Thailand, the later decades of the twentieth century were witness to a proliferation of transgender, transsexual and male and female same-sex identity categories and a dramatic increase in the public visibility of new gender/sexual cultures. However, this proliferation of identities and cultures, which superficially mirrors the historical situation in the West, occurred in the absence of the forms of bio-power that Foucault argues incited the origin of the contemporary discourse of sexuality and the associated speciation of 'the homosexual' and 'the heterosexual'. In exploring this apparent paradox, I 'forget' the details of Foucault's history of sexuality in the West while relying upon his conception of bio-history and his genealogical method. While the empirical contents of The History of Sexuality: Volume 1 offer little insight into transformations of Thai gender and eroticism, Foucault's genealogical approach provides a productive tool for understanding how local forms of power incite distinctive and equally local forms of discourse and subjectivity. In this study I draw upon Butler's Foucault-influenced account of the performativity of gender and sex to trace the ways that shifts in the forms of bio-power over gender in Thailand not only altered norms of masculinity and femininity but also radically changed patterns of desire and identity. I account for the emergence of the new Thai identities and gender/sexual cultures by mapping the precise character of changes in the forms of power that the Thai state deployed in its efforts to 'civilise' the public gendering of the populace—a project of power incited into being as a response to the combined challenges of English, French, Japanese and American imperialisms in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This study reveals that even in the absence of Western-style interventions in sexuality, the disruptions of traditional Siamese gender culture caused by the state's response to the West radically altered the performative norms of masculinity and femininity, which in turn contributed to the proliferation of new forms of transgender and same-sex identity. This Thai case study provides a counter-example to the presumption that modernity and globalisation necessarily lead to an international homogenisation of sexual cultures.