Description
Book SynopsisIn
Ghostly Desires Arnika Fuhrmann examines post-1997 Thai cinema and video art to show how vernacular Buddhist values, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring in current struggles over gender, sexuality, personhood, and collective life.
Trade Review“
Ghostly Desires is about much more than Thai cinema. Fuhrmann pursues these diverse moving image-makers far beyond the nation’s moral-institutional architecture; and their “queering” of that architecture takes her far beyond the critical conventions of gender studies.” -- David Teh * Pacific Affairs *
"
Ghostly Desires has indeed opened new conversations on the question of how the diverse genres of recent Thai cinema challenge us to refashion theory." -- Peter A. Jackson * Journal of Southeast Asian Studies *
"A deft and delicately defined analysis of the intersections between queer sexuality, vernacular Buddhist tenets and Thai cinema, tales and images." -- Rachel Harrison * Sojourn *
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Ghostly Desires has achieved a rare accomplishment in the field of Thai studies. It fuses innovative, postmodern theoretical sophistication with a rich grounding and expertise in the Thai cultural, historical, and aesthetic context." -- Megan Sinnott * Sojourn *
"Fuhrmann mines the rich materialist indexicality of ghosts to dazzling effect in her brilliant new study of queer sexuality and Buddhist-coded tropologies of desire . . . singularly impressive achievement that stages valuable interventions in competing interdisciplinary debates about cinema, religion, and sexual publics. . . . A dazzling debut from an important new voice in feminist, queer, and Asian cultural studies that deserves a wide and appreciative readership." -- Brett Farmer * GLQ *
"Brilliant ... Arnika Fuhrmann’s transdisciplinary approach is a perfect example of what the queering of area studies can look like and thus fits well with the idea of New Area Studies research and its goal to investigate situated differences and formulate mid-range concepts." -- Benjamin Baumann * Journal of Asian Studies *
"
Ghostly Desires entreats viewers to cast their glance anew in the direction of cinema’s apparitions, mapping spectral desire along previously undetected coordinates of queerness and counternormativity. Its interdisciplinary orientation renders
Ghostly Desires an essential contribution to scholarship across cinema studies, Southeast Asian studies, queer and affect theory, Buddhist studies, and beyond. Fuhrmann’s is a provocative and illuminating study rendered in a register no less haunting than its subject matter." -- Laura Isabel Serna and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian * Journal of Cinema and Media Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
Introduction. Buddhist Sexual Contemporaneity 1
1.
Nang-Nak—Ghost Wife: Desire, Embodiment, and Buddhist Melancholia in a Contemporary Thai Ghost Film 47
2.
The Ghost Seer: Chinese Thai Minority Subjectivity, Female Agency, and the Transnational Uncanny in the Films of Danny and Oxide Pang 87
3.
Tropical Malady: Same-Sex Desire, Casualness, and the Queering of Impermanence in the Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul 122
4.
Making Contact: Contingency, Fantasy, and the Performance of Impossible Intimacies in the Video Art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook 160
Coda. Under Permanent Exception: Thai Buddhist-Muslim Coexistence, Interreligious Intimacy, and the Filmic Archive 185
Notes 199
Bibliography 231
Index 249
