QUEERING THE CULTURE QUEERING THE CULTURE: HOW DOES THE GAY DISCOURSE CHANGE IF WE TAKE CROSS CULTURAL COMMUNICATION SERIOUSLY?

Body theory has been an area of growth, ambivalence, and politics in the last twenty years, yet the graft with ‘Asianness ’ remains unstable. Beyond generalised tropes of Orientalism, close textual analysis is required to understand the sexualized context of the non-Western gay male body. This essay works through the multiple readings of gay foreign bodies represented within both Thai and Australian popular culture and academic texts. Through relevant textual analysis, an examination into cultural meanings, readership practices, and appropriation by and from Western media culture probes the relationship between images of ‘gayness ’ and Thai ‘gay ’ identity. This essay investigates the semiotic construction of ‘gay ’ discourses in both Thai and Western popular images for both the Thai and Western reader. A critique of how ‘gay ’ is translated, embodied, and defined within representations and images in Thai popular culture demonstrates that Thai ‘queer ’ communities resist neo-colonialist discourses by selectively appropriating particular Western gay terminology and identities in order to create distinctly Thai discourses of ‘gayness’. Yet within English language-Thai popular culture, the Thai gay male body is often represented as a highly sexualised, commodified and exoticised site for Western surveillance and consumption. However, this paper is interested in more than the exoticisation of deviance. Thailand is too often theorised merely as the epicentre of sexual excess, prostitution, and HIV/AIDS transmission, as is ‘gayness’. This paper posits that this is not a cause (or a majority) but more a symptom of the depolitization of images of ‘otherness ’ which is far removed from the instigation of necessary political change.