Thailand Misconstrued

Thailand Misconstrued:

Tracing the Secular Western Discourse on Sexuality, Modernity, and Secularism to an

Unexpected Place

Aryeh Cohen

Abstract

This paper uses examples from media, personal experience, academic research, and theory to examine Western perceptions of Thai sexuality and Thai Buddhism, and how they are informed by a Western discourse on sexuality, modernity, and secularism.

The relationship between sexuality and religion in Muslim communities, around which this Western discourse is so often focused, provides a context for me to gain scholarly insight into this discourse, and for me to analyze its presence in a deep common Western misrepresentation of Thai sexuality and religion, revealing some of its basic inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Cohen 2

Introduction

In the weeks before I left for a semester in Thailand, many of my send-offs included a jovial comment or anecdote about lady-boys or happy endings. I had no intention of exploring the sex tourism industry, but naturally I grew curious about the significance of these features that seemed to define every expectation of the Thai experience. Indeed, I encountered kathoeys (transgender or transsexual individuals) on a daily basis, but the aggressive sexuality of which I was warned only occurred in tourist districts. Over time, I began to realize how apparently non-sexual the society around me was through local Thai friends, Thai film, Thai television and advertising, and Thai music. In my last week there, nonetheless, I received a shocking and embarrassing reminder of the Western perception of Thai sexuality as I sat in a theater full of Thais, watching Hollywood depict their city as a hub of sex and sin in The Hangover II.

With a worldwide gross of over $581 million, The Hangover II offers what is easily the most widely viewed media representation of Thailand. The majority of the ﬁlm takes place in Bangkok, the location chosen for the premise of an unintended bachelor party in the craziest setting possible. Throughout the ﬁlm, the audience follows a hung- over, amnesic group of friends in their search for evidence of their drunken night-prior.

But what made Bangkok the choice city for the creators of The Hangover II? The answer is shamelessly revealed halfway through the ﬁlm when a kathoey prostitute, baring her sexually ambiguous body, calmly informs groom-to-be Stu of their ‘magical’ sex the night before. And, in case the audience has somehow forgotten this crucial scene, the closing credits roll beside photos of the wild night, many of which feature prostitutes, strippers, and sexual performers. It is this shocking and exotic sexual world that earns

2 Cohen 3

Bangkok its role in The Hangover II. Yet juxtaposed to the focus on Bangkok’s sex, crime, and grime, the ﬁlm also features a Buddhist monk—another ubiquity in Thailand.

However, instead of using the monk as a realistic representation of Thai Buddhism, the

filmmakers opt for more shock and irony as the monk is depicted participating in the night’s events. While it is understandable for fictional, shock-comedic filmmaking to hyperbolize and fabricate aspects of a culture, in doing so The Hangover II accepts and re-projects a misconstruction of Thai sexuality and Thai Buddhism. My purpose is not to critique the film—although I will occasionally—but to use it as a reflection on Western perception and construction of sexuality and religion in Thailand.

I begin this paper by looking at the ways in which the West perceives Thailand to be a host for free sexuality. I then link the Western perception of Thai sexuality to the

Western ideals of tolerance and modernity, using Wendy Brown’s discussion of tolerance and Judith Butler’s discussion of sexual freedom and modernity. From there I emphasize the roles of secularism and sexual freedom in Western modernity discourse, drawing from

Joan Scott’s writing on the headscarf controversy in France and Jospeh Massad’s writing on the concept of “The Gay International” and its effect on Islamic societies. These texts offer conceptual grounds through which I present and analyze the Western construction of a secularized Thai Buddhism that Westerners appreciate and often appropriate. The ﬁnal section addresses how this construction contrasts to and interacts with the realities of

Thai sexuality and Thai Buddhism. I conclude that examining Western perceptions and constructions of Thai sexuality and Thai Buddhism reveals far less about the actualities of

Thai culture than it reveals about the fogged ideological lens of interpretation offered by

Western sexual and religious discourse.

3 Cohen 4

Sexual Freedom: A Western Marker of Tolerance and Modernity

A young man named Joe begins researching for his upcoming Thai vacation on

Google. After looking into travel logistics and potential locations, he investigates the evening entertainment, searching “Bangkok nightlife” and “Thai nightlife.” The top hit for “Bangkok nightlife” is bangkok.com/nightlife, a website whose home page features links to four main webpages, “Top 10 Nightlife experiences,” “Where to go,” “Gay

Bangkok,” and “Go-Go bars.” He visits the “Top 10” page, on which he ﬁnds “Naughty

Night on the Go-Go trails,” “Bangkok Ladyboy Shows,” and “Gay Night: Tickled Pink.”

His search on “Thai Nightlife” yields results such as thainite.com, where self-proclaimed

“resident sleaze hounds” offer wisdom on bar girls and massage parlors. A month later, his friends offer him the typical bon voyage, “watch out for the ladyboys,” and send him on a plane across the paciﬁc. He arrives at night, and a taxi takes him to Bangkok’s

Khaosan Road, where Tuk-Tuk drivers greet him in a chorus of “Ping-pong show? Ping- pong show?”

While Joe is hypothetical, the Google results, bon voyage, and Khaosan Road experience are real. For any tourist staying on the beaten track, a Thai experience will be infused with talk or offers of sex tourism and encounters with aggressive kathoeys, creating a highly sexualized Western non-academic discourse about Thailand. The advertisement and large presence of transgender and gay nightlife opportunities additionally create a sense of openness in terms of sexual orientation. Many Westerners would consider this non-restrictive sexuality and sense of openness as indications of tolerance, a word Wendy Brown examines closely in Regulating Aversion (2006).

4 Cohen 5

Brown quickly introduces tolerance as not just a word, but a broad concept and lively discourse that has been revived and reoriented over the past thirty years. While at its root the word tolerance simply implies endurance, Brown discusses how the recent discourse surrounding tolerance marks it as a “fundamental component of universal human dignity” (Brown 2006). She explores differences in the function and modality of tolerance discourse when addressing domestic issues of multiculturalism, sexuality, or religion, and also the broader categorical assumption that entire nations or cultures can foster or repress a general ‘tolerant’ ideology. Notably, Brown acknowledges the “Euro-

Atlantic political imaginary within which the nation-states of the West are presumed always already tolerant” (Brown 2006). In the same political imaginary, Islamic nations are typically presumed intolerant due to political implementation of Sharia law and

“repressively” modest clothing. The Western perception of nation-states or cultures as tolerant or intolerant often stems from the Western perception of non-Western treatment of sexuality, in terms of both sexual orientation and freedom of sexual expression.

In “Sexual politics, torture, and secular time,” Judith Butler scrutinizes cases in which Western nations use sexual freedom to boast modernism and progressive values, while simultaneously presuming the lack of such values elsewhere (Butler 2008). Butler illustrates this through a portion of the Netherlands’ new immigration test. Applicants are shown photos of two men kissing, and one’s response to the images determines whether he or she is culturally advanced enough to become a citizen of Dutch sexually progressive democracy. It appears, however, that the test was not so much designed to normalize homosexuality in Holland, but rather to eliminate the ﬂow of immigrants from cultures with differing norms. The test is clearly targeted at individuals from

5 Cohen 6 presumptively pre-modern, intolerant cultures; European nationals, citizens of the USA,

Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, and Switzerland, and individuals earning over

45,000 Euro per year are exempted from the obligation. Butler challenges the policy on several grounds, arguing that this “civic integration exam” aims more toward cultural coercion than diversity. She questions whether “the exam [becomes] the means for testing tolerance,” or instead “[carries] out an assault against religious minorities…[demanding] coercively that they rid themselves of their traditional religious beliefs and practices in order to gain entry into the Netherlands” (Butler 2008). The Western presumption of its own modernity and tolerance in this instance is displayed by the presumed lack of homophobia in wealthy secular democracies, but contradicted by the policy’s intrinsic racial and cultural generalizations and preferences. By presenting an immigration test that targets a specific ideology, and exempting individuals of certain nationality and income, the Dutch government is undeniably conflating ideology with nationality and economic status and openly declaring intolerance for individuals of conflicting ideology.

Brown and Butler both point to the self-congratulatory nature of Western discourse around tolerance and modernity accompanying the shallow, generalizing condescension with which these discourses often treat non-Western nations. The non-

Western examples, however, are almost always Islamic nations dubbed intolerant or pre- modern for their homophobia or repressed female sexuality. If Islamic nations are ignorantly judged on their surface—ultra-modest clothing and a conservative legal system—then how is Thailand judged by the same discursive logic? As illustrated earlier through Joe’s web research, a quick Western glance at Thailand is ﬂooded with sexuality.

Hypothetically, if Thailand were a wealthier nation with more emigrants to the

6 Cohen 7

Netherlands, might its perceived sexual freedom grant it exemption from the Dutch immigration exam? The answer would have to take into consideration that Thailand is ofﬁcially Buddhist, with ninety-ﬁve percent of the population claiming Buddhism personally (and the remainder Muslim, Christian, or other) (www.cia.gov 2000).

Exempliﬁed in issues such as France’s ban on conspicuous religious symbols in schools, the secular Western ideology considers religiosity to be antithetical to modernity. At the same time we can see an ideological bond between secularity, tolerance, and sexual freedom fostered through examples such as the Dutch immigration test.

The Secular Modern and the Sexual Secular

The discursive dichotomy between religion and modernity is not hard to ﬁnd throughout recent history. It has grown with the West’s “disenchantment,” the modernizing process of moving away from faith and towards reason, famously described by Max Weber. One of the most monumental contributions to the dichotomy was Charles

Darwin’s study of evolution, which ignited a perpetual debate between modern science and fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism through its contradiction of the Old

Testament’s historical legitimacy. While many individuals have successfully incorporated both religion and modernity into their lives, there remains a discursive conﬂict between the two on a political and ideological scale. Along with fundamentalist religion comes fundamentalist secularity, often ﬁercely dedicated to progressive modernity. In 2002, the

French government went beyond the boundaries of Laïcité (strict separation of church and state), banning the wearing of Muslim headscarves in public schools. This policy, whose subsequent controversy is analyzed by Joan Scott, underlines how the government

7 Cohen 8 of France sees a need to protect its modern, secular state from the “backwardness” of religion.

In “Politics of the Veil,” Scott reveals the inaccurate ground on which the French vilify the headscarf, and also examines Western insecurities in the face of religion. The public critique of the headscarf is based on the notion that it symbolizes women’s subordination, inequality, and sexual oppression, an assumption that voluntary wearers of the headscarf have tried to dispel. This critique often made in the name of feminism calls to mind the same cultural incommensurability between modernity and religion that underlies in the Dutch determination of who must take their immigration test.

Furthermore, Scott argues that French critics of the headscarf have a deeper issue with it; by wearing the scarf, young women deny French men of their normative sexualized interactions, and also lose their own female sexuality that is afﬁrmed by the male gaze

(Scott 2010). While one should assume that a secular, liberal democracy would give individuals the right to determine their own expression of sexuality, Scott highlights the importance of unrestricted and expressive sexuality within ideologies of modernity and secularity. The notion that individuals in Islamic society must be freed sexually appears frequently in Western discourses of sexuality and modernity, but Joseph Massad points to this issue and its consequences through an unlikely example.

In “Re-orienting desire,” Massad introduces the concept of “The Gay

International,” referring to Western-based gay rights groups who follow the “orientalist impulse” to liberate non-Western (namely Arab Muslim) ‘homosexuals’ from their alleged oppression (Massad 2007). Massad explains that homophobia was discursively unapparent in the Muslim world before the Gay International introduced ideas of

8 Cohen 9 exclusively homosexual or trans-sexual identities. Prior to the introduction of homosexuality as a gender group, identity, or community in the Muslim world, same-sex acts were not uncommon, yet participants were not put under public scrutiny as they were not a deﬁned and isolated ‘other’ within the population. Massad argues that this

‘liberating’ mission began, failed, and backﬁred due to the faulty Western assumption that

Western gender roles and sexual identities exist everywhere (Massad 2007). This assumption is not ethically wrong or stupid, as most humans subconsciously expect their own cultural norms and roles exist in other cultures. However, the assumption becomes dangerous when paired with the assumption that Islam fundamentally oppresses sexuality, sparking an orientalist impulse in the Westerner to free ‘the other’ from his or her own oppressive culture.

Islamic societies have been criticized time and time again for repressing sexuality through anti-modern and hyper-religious social and legal norms. Indeed, many Muslim practices embody modesty and limit physical interaction between unmarried men and women, but there is a great difference between personal sexual restraint and religio- political sexual oppression. The lack of sexual freedom for which Islamic nations are criticized is based on detached Western cultural interpretations of clothing and practices often only seen through Western media sources. Religiosity, through this lens, is the roadblock to modernity. But where, in this dichotomy between religion and modernity, does Thailand ﬁt in? It is undeniably a Buddhist nation; intricate temples and robed monks are everywhere. Streets, homes, and businesses are lined with images of the beloved king whose roles include defending the Buddhist faith in Thailand. Yet it seems that the French government, so critical of the Islamic head covering, would laud Thailand

9 Cohen 10 for the images of scantily clad night-club dancers advertising Thai nightlife on the internet. Similarly, the Netherlands would be impressed with the variety of sexual orientations represented within the society.

The Western Construction of Secularized Thai Buddhism

When the keepers of secular Western modernity encounter this ‘paradoxical’ coexistence of religion and modernity, they tend not to reconsider the dichotomy placed between the two; rather, they construct a secularized version of religion that negates faith.

In place of faith, secularized religion is given value as a historical cultural phenomenon that can offer community and spirituality without adherence to religious legal, moral, or sexual restrictions. Secularized religion is not only constructed from the outside; many

Westerners secularize their own religion in order to embrace modernity without renouncing their historical connections and community afﬁliations. As a secular reform

Jew, my personal Judaism is an example of self-secularized religion. While the qualities and emphases of secularized religion are generally consistent, a signiﬁcant difference lies between self-secularized religion, and the construction of a secularized non-Western religion by the West. The former is simply an exercise of personal freedom. The latter, on the other hand, is another way in which Western modernism seeks to neutralize what would otherwise be considered an inconsistency in its discursive framework. In the construction of secularized Thai Buddhism, secular Western modernists can adjust their argument to target politicized, oppressive, and conspicuous religiosity rather than religion in general.

10 Cohen 11

The comfort with which Westerners interact with Thai Buddhism is both a cause and a product of its constructed secularization. While observant Thai Buddhism places certain rules and restrictions upon its practitioners, it lacks an offensive drive toward outsiders, either through conversion or threats of eternal damnation. With no prescribed garments or conspicuous accessories for laypeople, it allows for individuality and public assimilation in ways that orthodox Muslim and Jewish dress codes do not. Moreover, there is no Thai Buddhist equivalent to the USA’s political Christian right, who tirelessly work to legally oppress homosexuality based on scriptural belief. The coercive attitudes of Evangelical Christianity and Mormonism are absent as well, relieving visiting

Westerners of any pressure to convert or conform. It is no surprise that a religion like this does not pose a huge threat to the Western secular movement, and Westerners are delightfully comfortable visiting Buddhist temples and interacting with monks. While this level of comfort might imply that Thai Buddhism is merely interesting and non- threatening to outsiders, the actual secularization of Thai Buddhism is apparent when this comfort level is raised to the point of appropriation.

Appropriation of Thai Buddhism is marked by a level of involvement below conversion, but above acting merely out of respect or curiosity. Throughout my time in

Thailand, I was both a witness to and a participant of appropriation. When visiting temples (wats), many Western tourists proceed to light incense held in place by hands in a wai (palms together in prayer or respect), silently kneeling prostrate before statues of the

Buddha. Whether praying, meditating, or simply admiring the surroundings, it is hard to imagine the same people so involved in the sacred space of another religion. Westerners often take meditation courses, sleep in monasteries and follow monks on their morning

11 Cohen 12 begging route, donate money to temples, or buy and wear Buddhist amulets. Many tourists especially smitten with Thai culture even get tattooed with a traditional Buddhist

Yantra design or depiction of the Buddha. For most Western appropriators, their deep involvement is out of a genuine appreciation for the culture and the religion, but it seems that appropriation is dependent upon its constructed secularity. One would presume that a secular, religiously unafﬁliated visitor to Jerusalem would not leave wearing a cross around his neck, a yarmulke on his head, and a phrase from the Koran tattooed on his arm, solely because he respects the tenets and histories of the religions; even just one variation of the three would be unlikely. The fact that even afﬁliates of other religions

(myself, for example) appropriate aspects of Thai Buddhism with no spiritual or ideological conﬂict offers further evidence that appropriation signiﬁes the Western construction of its secularity.

On the one hand, the secular appropriation of Thai Buddhism is a promising example of modern Westerners ﬁnding an outlet for spirituality and a connection to non-

Western history and culture. On the other hand, the appropriation of Thai Buddhism is a grim look into the pick-and-choose, scratch-the-surface tourist approach to culture absorption, which perpetuates the construction of a secularized Buddhism. As more visitors take home amulets and tattoos as souvenirs, they compromise the traditional meaning and signiﬁcance of the amulet or tattoo ritual. The tourist impulse to photograph everything including religious spaces, even in the midst of appropriation, momentarily transforms sacred spaces and ceremonies into museums and cultural experiences. Indeed, for many Western tourists, the interaction with Thai Buddhism is not far removed from the interaction with the sex-tourism industry. Tourists staying in the backpacker’s district

12 Cohen 13 of Bangkok have days ﬁlled with temples and monks followed by nights on Khaosan road or Soi Cowboy ﬁlled with offers of sex or sexual entertainment. This strange juxtaposition embodies the Western perception of Thai sexuality and construction of secularized Thai Buddhism. Having been fortunate enough to stay a while and immerse myself in the Thai university system and among local young adults, I am inspired to analyze the discrepancies between the Thai and Western perspectives of sexuality, tolerance, and Buddhism in Thailand.

Realities of Thai sexuality, tolerance, and Buddhism

The beaten tourist path in Thailand has been built around the desires and expectations of Western visitors over the past few decades, and in some ways has indeed become the sexualized Thailand some imagine. Fortunately for Thais, the beaten track covers minimal ground in relation to the vast reaches of Bangkok and the country as a whole. Thai Thailand embraces a disparate sexual culture. Juxtaposed to the sex industry is a heavily censored society, in which sexuality exists predominantly under the radar.

While the Western media endlessly advertises Sexy, Thai media is all about Cute. Rather than suggesting that buying a certain product will guarantee sex, Thai advertisements opt for humor or puppy love. Pop music is focused around love or heartbreak, not sex and misogyny. The Cute theme in Thai media represents the Thai view of ideal female sexuality. Thai society, especially the upper class, protects its young women from feeling sexual desires and embraces modesty as a norm. Young men are allowed to nurture their sexuality, but not at the expense of a young woman’s purity, creating a market for prostitution outside the tourist industry (Taywaditep et al). However, prostitutes who

13 Cohen 14 satisfy these desires are not so much a representation of Thai sexuality, but of rural, lower-class need for income and of sex trafﬁcking in the region.

While popular media and Taywaditep’s research may offer a relatively accurate generalization about Thai sexuality within a certain demographic, it is difﬁcult to get a sense of sexual culture within different social, economic, and geographic environments.

Thus, I ﬁnd it most effective to reﬂect on the Thai university environment, one in which I was most integrated, and which most closely compares to my social environment in the

U.S. Many groups of friends are noticeably comprised of one gender, a norm that most likely contributes to the lack of casual sexual relations. Of the university-age friend groups I interacted with, frequent gender integration was only apparent within those whose members had traveled to the US or Europe and were conspicuously inﬂuenced by

Western norms in several ways. While friend groups are gendered, it is also common for a clique of girls to include a gay male. A traditional Thai perception and treatment of homosexuality and transgenderism is difﬁcult to determine as an outsider, but the Thai adolescents and young adults I interacted with never expressed any negative attitudes toward gays, and openly gay students in my classes were especially outgoing and well received by others. While it seems that peers in the university environment accept their homosexuality, scholarly research suggests that this acceptance may be lacking elsewhere in Thai society.

In “Tolerant but Unaccepting: The Myth of a Thai ‘Gay Paradise,’” Peter A.

Jackson analyzes the public treatment and private sentiment towards homosexuals and kathoeys in Thai society. He emphasizes the difference between tolerance and acceptance in Thailand, noting that many Thais disapprove of homosexuality and transgenderism, but

14 Cohen 15 simply keep their criticism private. Jackson also addresses the difference in treatment of kathoeys and homosexual men; kathoeys are generally thought of as a harmless and entertaining third gender, whereas homosexual men are less accepted as they compromise

“natural” roles of gender and sexuality. Historically, members of a third gender have been present in Thai myths and stories up to now, and their physical embodiment of the opposite sex places them within an acceptable gender role since their sexual and gender identity is not hidden. In contrast, homosexual men who remain in their male bodies are considered dangerous to some, as they do not outwardly reveal their sexual identity

(Jackson 1999).

In light of Joseph Massad’s article on The Gay International, it is interesting to analyze Thais’ literal tolerance of homo- or trans-sexual individuals in comparison to the

Muslim Arab world where terminology/discourse, and thus contention around homo- and trans-sexuality did not exist prior to the Gay International movement in the Arab world.

The Western discourses around Thai sexuality and Arab Muslim sexuality now contrast greatly, but sexuality in the two areas have seemingly similar histories. When open Thai homosexuality ﬁrst emerged in the 1960s, it was met with criticism and even violence, and media uncomfortably and dramatically covered “men…who call themselves

‘gay’” (Jackson 1999). However, with evidence of the kathoey gender dating back to classical Thai literature, it is impossible to assume same-sex acts did not occur before the

1960s in Thailand. Likewise, we see the introduction of a speciﬁcally homosexual identity arouse ﬁerce oppression in the Arab Muslim world, where same-sex acts previously went unnoticed legally or discursively (Massad 2007). In both Thailand and the Arab Muslim world, the West brought emphasis to the notion of sexual orientation

15 Cohen 16 and the marked category of homosexuality. Now, the West has ascribed levels of tolerance or oppression to these regions and cultures based on their perceived responses to such sexual categories.

While Jackson is probably the most experienced and proliﬁc scholar in this ﬁeld, his conclusions of thirteen years ago may already be changing in the face of global connectivity and the consequent Westernization of Thai media. A recent interview with actress Yasmin Lee, the kathoey pornographic actress in The Hangover II sheds light on the contemporary treatment of kathoeys in Thailand. According to Lee,

…among the 300,000 transsexuals living in Bangkok, there are many who are

working in the mainstream and are more accepted there than anywhere else in the

world. But the majority of Thai transsexuals are sex workers. There are clubs after

clubs of Go-Go dancing transgender women. Actually, it’s a very big part of

Thailand’s economy, and these girls are loved, accepted and acknowledged by the

people, the government, and the media (translabyrinth.com).

Lee’s assertion that these girls are “loved [and] accepted” clearly contradicts Jackson’s conclusions that homosexuals and transgenders are merely tolerated but not accepted.

Without challenging the legitimacy of either stance, this contradiction reveals the relatively recent progress toward acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism.

Jackson’s research focuses on the second half of the 20th century, whereas Lee provides her ﬁrsthand observation and experience in 2011.

Conclusion

16 Cohen 17

Next door to a Go-Go bar in one of Thailand’s tourist districts a woman might receive the ﬁnishing touches on a traditional Buddhist tattoo on her ankle. She is unaware that the lower body is considered impure in Thai culture, and by placing the tattoo on her ankle she is disrespecting the religion she will represent for the rest of her life. This type of ignorant appropriation of Thai Buddhism sparked a controversy between Thailand’s culture ministry and “tattoo tourism” industry last year, bringing to light the Buddhist plea to be taken seriously within the tourist culture (bangkokpost.com). The depiction of

Thai Buddhism in The Hangover II is another testament to how the secularized construction of Thai Buddhism fails to take the religion seriously as an authoritative tradition. Implying that the monk partied like an animal was not the ﬁlm’s chief fault, as religious ﬁgures are often parodied in comedy. The disrespect was in the carelessness of depicting the monk; Thai monks do not wear red robes (Tibetan monks do), and Thai monks do not take vows of silence.

While the West exalts itself on so many platforms as superior in progressiveness and tolerance, Western media and politics rarely fail to make shallow observations and generalizations regarding non-Western societies. In the same vein, Western media is unfortunately unreﬂective on its own remaining homophobia and religious ignorance, displayed in media such as The Hangover II. Initially, I planned to research and write about the relationship between Thai sexuality and religion. However, further research and analysis offered more of a reﬂection on Western ideals, perceptions, and constructions in its interaction with non-Western societies. In tracing the discursive applications of sexuality, tolerance, modernity, and secularity in relation to Islamic societies and

17 Cohen 18

Thailand, I have investigated how these discourses inform (and misinform) Western media treatment, views, and experiences of Thailand.

Bibliography

Brown, Wendy.

2006 Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the age of Identity and Empire. Princeton:

Princeton University Press.

Butler, Judith.

2008 “Sexual politics, torture, and secular time.” British Journal of Sociology

59(1):1-23.

Jackson, Peter A. and Nerido M. Cook, eds.

1999 Genders & Sexualities in Modern Thailand. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books.

Kittiwut Jod Taywaditep, M.D., M.A., Eli Coleman, Ph.D. and Pacharin

Dumronggittigule, M.Sc. Thailand: Basic Sexological Premises.

http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/IES/thailand.html#1.

Massad, Joseph.

2007 “Re-orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World.” Desiring

Arabs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Scott, Joan W.

2010 “Sexuality.” Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

The Hangover II (2011). www.bangkok.com

18 Cohen 19 www.bangkokpost.com www.translabyrinth.com www.thainite.com