Orientalist obsessions: fabricating hyper-reality and performing hyper-femininity in Thailand's kathoey tourism

Abstract

Depictions of servile and hypersexual transwomen have come to reinforce Thailand's reputation as an exotic and erotic playground. Despite their almost ubiquitious presence in tourist spaces, the theorization of transgender subjectivities from a localized Asian perspective tends to be glossed over in the literature on leisure and recreation, perhaps due to their complex position within a Western-centric, binary model of gender and sexuality. This paper attempts to fill this lacuna by mobilizing the concept of Orientalism and relatedly, the Orientalist tourist gaze. In so doing, it argues that colonial mythologies of the Orient are writ large in the commodification of transgendered bodies and the evocation of hyper-realities. In this manner, even as kathoeys (Thai vernacular for male to female transpeople) are capable of manipulating tourists in artful ways, I contend that postcolonial power asymmetries are systematically perpetuated through the ‘libidinization’ of Thailand.

Keywords:

• transgender
• Orientalism
• postcolonialism
• tourist gaze
• sex tourism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editor of this journal, Professor Neil Carr, for his guidance and patience. This paper also benefited from the insights of two anonymous referees. Special thanks go to Justin Ng for proof-reading the manuscript.

Notes on contributor

Qian Hui graduated from the National University of Singapore with a Masters in Social Science. Her interests are broadly related to queer and feminist geographies of the body.

Notes

1. I acknowledge that not all individuals who seek sexual services from kathoeys are necessarily tourists, or are tourists from Western countries (these individuals may be expatriates may even be domestic tourists from other parts of Thailand). Additionally, whereas not all kathoey-related tourism necessarily translates into transgender sex tourism, the complex links between the sex and tourism industry render it difficult is difficult to make clear cut distinctions between the two.

2. I have decided to use “she” and “her” to refer to kathoeys, in order to emphasize the kathoeys' performed gender identity, which is predominantly feminine. Peter Jackson (1999) has also noted the widespread, the widespread use of feminine personal pronouns among kathoeys themselves. I avoided using s/he or (s)he because that would wrongly allude to the gender/sex subversive potential of the kathoeys. Typically, kathoeys working in the tourism sector inadvertently affirm Eurocentric and heteronormative gender/sex ideologies and this augments the intensity of the of the Orientalist tourist gaze.

3. Feminists have insisted that an Orientalist gaze is almost always a masculinist and heteronormative one (see Rose 1993). Although these ‘different types of gazes’ are a product of different epistemologies, in reality, colonialism and heterosexism often work in tandem to reproduce power differentials between hosts and tourists.