Korean-Pop, Tom Gay Kings, Les Queens and the Capitalist Transformation of Sex/Gender Categories in Thailand

Abstract

Since the early 2000s, masculine style for queer women in Thailand has been heavily influenced by Korean popular culture, or “K-pop”. K-pop is marked by deliberate gender androgyny and overall gender play. This new aesthetics of masculinity used by masculine-identifying women has been accompanied by linguistic shifts in which explicitly sexualised terms, such as queen and king , themselves products of complex transnational borrowings, have been borrowed from Thai gay male culture. This paper seeks to explore the possibilities of queer cultural transformation through forms of commodified images and capitalist intrusions. It also explores the process of creative borrowings made through transnational, national and local circuits of knowledge. This article is based on ethnographic research conducted in 2009 and 2010 focused on young queer women in Bangkok who have adopted the K-pop style and the new sexualised terms of identity, such as tom gay king and les queen , for example. It is also based on review of printed material including the fashion magazine Tom Act and the NGO publication Anjareesarn.