Queering the culture: how does the gay discourse change if we take cross cultural communication seriously?

Abstract

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 sexualised 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’.