Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Lee Hsiao Yen Fiona, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

What happens when desire and sexual personhood are rendered neither exclusively in terms of liberalism nor entirely in local idioms purported to be antithetical to liberalism? While much energy has been invested into asserting the global or local provenance of contemporary Thai sexualities, this talk concentrates on how the globally circulating Thai cinema of the 1990s and 2000s conceptualizes sexual personhood in nonorthodox and non-doctrinal Buddhist frames of thought as well as in the languages of law, policy, and nation.

This talk investigates the cinema of contemporary Thai directors such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul in which both liberalism and Buddhism appear in at times contradictory and highly defamiliarized guises. It uses the fact that imaginations of sexuality are concurrently anchored in Buddhist-informed understandings and in frames of thought that conceive of sexuality as a question of rights as an occasion to probe the mobility of the valences of liberal ideologies as well as the variability of meaning of Buddhist-coded representation and political discourse in Thailand. Its analysis centers on the problematic effects that the Buddhist-liberal synthesis has engendered for women and for gay, lesbian, and trans people as well as on the radical possibilities that it opens up. Ultimately the paper is especially interested in how contemporary Thai independent film deploys secular notions of freedom and rights in combination with Buddhist images, stories, and concepts to wholly unorthodox, radical ends.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic and political modernities. Her book Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016) examines how Buddhist-coded anachronisms of haunting figure struggles over sexuality, personhood, and notions of collectivity in contemporary Thai cinema. In a new research project, Fuhrmann focuses on new media and how the study of the digital allows for a perspective on the political public sphere that transcends commonplace distinctions between liberalism and illiberalism. This project intersects with her interests in the transformation of cities in contemporary Southeast and East Asia. Fuhrmann’s recent writing has appeared in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Oriens Extremus, and Positions: Asia Critique. Complementing her academic work, she also engages in cultural programming and works in the curatorial team of the Asian Film Festival Berlin (www.asianfilmfestivalberlin.de). She is currently Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies in Cornell University’s Department of Asian Studies.

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