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Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016)
$17.47 (www.dukeupress.edu, discount code P16GHOST) Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity. |
Still from The Island Funeral (Pimpaka Towira, 2015)Essay: "The Story of Untold Displacements: Buddhist-Muslim Intimacies and Visions of Ethnic Coexistence in a Thai Queer-Feminist Filmic Archive" (Camera Obscura, September 2019).
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STILL from AB-Normal Beauty (Oxide Pang, 2004)Essay: "Ab-normal Beauty: Horror, Homoeroticism, and Agency in Southeast and East Asian Films of Possession" (French, 2018; English, forthcoming).
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