Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016)
$17.47 (www.dukeupress.edu, discount code P16GHOST)
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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.

"Through a bravura queering of Buddhist discourses of attachment, loss, and desire, Arnika Fuhrmann advances a deft and compelling critique of the limited framing of the current debates over state sexual regulation and queer and feminist advocacy in Thailand. Modeling how a queer feminist consideration of religion and film might proceed, this extraordinary book advances a queer critique of cinema that draws on Thai politics and counterdoctrinal uses of Buddhism. A brilliant book and an unquestionably major scholarly intervention, Ghostly Desires will galvanize the study of Thai cinema while taking the study of queer and political film more generally in new directions." — Bliss Cua Lim, author of Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique
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"Arnika Fuhrmann's brilliant book focuses on nondoctrinal, Thai, Buddhist ontologies where queer female figures form around Buddhist melancholia, affirming an impossible, temporally failed desire. Fuhrmann shows the critical potential of Buddhist-coded anachronism to reimagine attachment and create subjects who are universalizable but only in relation to queer soteriology and to our shared historical time. Beautifully written, Ghostly Desires is a joy to read and to contemplate." — Tani Barlow, author of The Question of Women in Chinese Feminism

Still from Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Essay: "This Area is [NOT] Under Quarantine: Rethinking Southeast/Asia Through Studies of the Cinema," (2017).

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; English, 2017).