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Introduction Sexual and gender cultures change constantly in response to shifts in social, political, and economic forces. This book details major changes that have taken place in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender/transsexual (LGBT) cultures and communities in Bangkok in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The capital of Thailand since 1782, Bangkok is a sprawling metropolis of more than 10 million people, and, as home to almost one-sixth of the country’s population, it is the unrivalled centre of national economic, political, and cultural activity. Highly visible gay, lesbian (tom-dee), and transgender/transsexual (kathoey) cultures emerged in the city in the decades after World War II, and Bangkok is also unrivalled as the centre of Thai queer life. As shown in the studies collected here, the first years of the new century have marked a significant transition moment for all of Thailand’s LGBT cultures, with a multidimensional expansion in the geographical extent, media presence, economic importance, political impact, social standing, and cultural relevance of Thai queer communities, which were already among the largest in the region—and, indeed, the world. This book traces the roles of the market and the media, notably cinema and the Internet, in the recent transformations of Bangkok’s queer communities and considers the ambiguous consequences that the growing commodification and mediatization of LGBT lives have had for queer rights in Thailand. The studies here consider Bangkok queer cultures until mid-2008, just before the onset of the global financial crisis in the second half of that year and before the intensification of political conflicts between supporters and opponents of the September 2006 military coup that toppled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. The impact on Bangkok queer scenes of the dramatic changes in Thailand’s economic and political circumstances since 2008 awaits future analysis. Queer Bangkok after the Millennium Beyond Twentieth-Century Paradigms Peter A. Jackson Peter A. Jackson 2 Beyond Stereotypes Outside Thailand, the country’s queer cultures are often known primarily by way of stereotypes of a supposed “gay paradise” (Jackson 1999a), a prevalence of transgender kathoeys or “ladyboys”, the widespread presence of both male and female sex work, and a supposedly queer-accepting culture where almost anything goes. Insider views that challenge these exoticizing stereotypes are surprisingly rare. In part this is a consequence of the fact that the international sectors of Bangkok’s queer scenes that are visited by most foreign tourists are linguistically compartmentalized and spatially separate from the much larger number of venues in other parts of the city that are frequented by Thai queers. By analysing what has been happening in the domestic Thai and intraAsian sectors of Bangkok’s queer scenes, the chapters here correct widespread misrepresentations presented by monolingual foreign commentators for whom the large Thai LGBT worlds beyond international tourist zones such as Silom Road remain all but invisible. This book brings together a genuinely transnational range of perspectives on twenty-first-century queer Bangkok; the authors come from Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, and the United States. This reflects the significant extent of academic interest in queer Thailand in the West and in other Asian countries. This collection emerges from papers presented in the genders and sexualities stream of panels convened as part of the Tenth International Conference of Thai Studies at Thammasat University in Bangkok in January 2008. More than half the papers presented in that conference stream were on LGBT topics, reflecting the rapid growth as well as the increasing mainstream relevance of research on queer Thailand. A significant proportion of the papers in that conference stream were presented by younger scholars at the M.A. and Ph.D. levels. Several chapters here showcase the path-breaking research that younger scholars in Asia and the West are conducting on queer Thailand. It is only in the past decade that research programmes at the Ph.D. level, using Thai as their medium, have expanded across the country’s tertiary education sector. It is still the case that the most advanced level of research undertaken by many Thai scholars is at the M.A. level. While this level of research is more focused in scope when compared with doctoral research, a growing body of M.A. work on queer themes has emerged in recent years, and it has increasingly challenged the pathologizing, biomedical focus of much twentieth-century Thai research on LGBT topics (Jackson 1997; Sinnott in this volume). As Timo Ojanen...

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