Thai (trans)genders and (homo)sexualities in a global context

Since the early 1990s many authors (e.g. Plummer 1992; Altman 1996a; Drucker 2000; Jackson 2000) have identified the proliferation of new same-sex and transgender identities, such as the Indonesian waria, Brazilian travesti and Thai tom-dee couples, as a significant instance of cultural globalisation. Dennis Altman has labelled this phenomenon �global queering�, 1 (Altman 1996a) and in a 1997 article �Global Gaze/Global Gays�, he observed: �What strikes me is that within a given country, whether Indonesia or the United States, Thailand or Italy, the range of constructions of homosexuality is growing� (Altman 1997: 424, emphases in original). While we still lack definitive answers to the question of what has produced a variety of apparently similar transgender and homosexual identities in diverse social, political and cultural settings, recent research on global queering in Asia has clarified the scope and nature of the phenomenon by challenging some earlier accounts of the globalisation of homosexual and transgender identities. In this chapter, I summarise key findings of this research as a basis for interpreting the modern histories of homosexuality and transgenderism in Thailand, providing one case study response to the question of what have been the sources of this global queering