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2 - Competing Cultures of Masculinity When Thai Transgender Bodies Go Through Muay Thai
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
In this chapter I consider the factors that have led to the national success of a number of male-to-female (m-t-f) transvestite kathoey Muay Thai boxers in Thailand. This is to a large extent a preliminary study, and I present a range of perspectives that stand as guidelines to be followed in future research on this topic. My data here come chiefly from ethnographic fieldwork on Thai kickboxing, or Muay Thai, carried out from 1999 to 2001 in the development of a Ph.D. thesis in anthropology (Rennesson 2005).1 Muay Thai can be defined as a truly gendered activity that places a strong emphasis on masculine behaviour. Peter Vail (1998) sees Muay Thai as one of the wombs of hypermasculinity, along with the monkhood and the status of a nakleng (an influential man, to put it succinctly), two other alternative masculine roles (1998, 320–328). Pattana Kitiarsa sees in Muay Thai a “true game of true men”, as “manhood is judged by victorious conquests over opponents through physical superiority, cunning, wit, mental strength and prowess” (2005, 67). Given this, I wish to consider the apparently paradoxical success of two crossdressing boxers, Norng Tum and his emulator, Norng Tim, who has not become as famous as the former. I draw on recent developments in gender analysis in Thailand that are embedded within contemporary critical theory. Peter Jackson (2003a), for instance, shows how the performative norms of masculine and feminine gendering have been altered and emphasized by the Thai state since the middle of the nineteenth century as part of a process that needs to be conceived as a self-civilizing response to the critiques of European colonial powers in Southeast Asia. For these powers, the androgyny of the premodern Siamese population was taken to be a sign of the country’s semi-barbarous backwardness. According to Jackson (2003a), we have to acknowledge the human body in the Thai context as marked by gender behavioural performative norms. Furthermore, Bernard Formoso (1987, 2001) has shown how Thais, 2 Competing Cultures of Masculinity When Thai Transgender Bodies Go Through Muay Thai Stéphane Rennesson Stéphane Rennesson 44 especially from the Lao-speaking northeast region of Isan, think of different social groups at every level as following metaphors of the human body. This analysis provides a tool of discrimination to think through the boundaries of social and cultural bodies. What should also be mentioned here is the great importance of the human body as a means for Thais to manage their relations to foreigners. Drawing on these lines of research, I shall explore here the hypothesis that the intense mediatization of Norng Tum, and particularly its resonances among the broader Thai population, is related to the self-civilizing management of Thai bodies both within Thailand but also, and primarily, at the international level.2 The broad context of my study is the enthusiasm of Thais for kathoey kickboxers in the context of the emphasis that local media put on the coverage of male boxing programmes. The question here is: In what particular ways do crossdressing boxers bring something special with their bodies into such a masculineoriented discipline as Muay Thai? First, I present some biographical features of the two cross-dressing boxers: Aphinya So Phumrin, who is usually called by his nickname, Norng Tim, or “YoungTim”(andwhoserealnameisSongritHomwan),andParinyaKiatbusaba, whose real name is Parinya Jaroenphol and who is generally known in Thailand by his nickname, Norng Tum, or “Young Tum”. The former appeared in the media for a short period in 2004, when he fought victoriously against an American boxer at the Lumphini Stadium in Bangkok, and is generally acknowledged to be a simple emulator of the latter. 3 Norng Tum is much more famous. He fought Muay Thai bouts, with a male body, from 1994, when he was just twelve years old. His image became omnipresent in the national media from February 1998, when he fought for the first time in Bangkok at Lumphini Stadium,4 until early 2000, just after he had undergone gender reassignment surgery in December 19995 that forced him out of the Muay Thai ring. As a woman, she came back for a few “freak” fighting exhibitions against female wrestlers and boxers in Thailand and in Japan until 2006. She then challenged a male Muay Thai boxer.6 We do not know what happened to Norng Tim after his brief breakthrough in 2004, but the whole country still gets regular news about his elder. No Thai...