Dormitoriesand OtherQueer Spaces: An Anthropology ofSpace, Gender, and theVisibility ofFemale Homoeroticism in Thailand MeflanSinnott In Thailand, many women spend part of their lives in dormito ries in order to live near their workplace or school. Dormitories were established as a response to the growth of urban and industrial jobs as well as the growth of schooling for girls and women in provincial and urban centers, and they can be found in factories, schools, and shopping malls. As a sex-segregated space, the dormitory has pro vided a homosocial environment that allows women to conform to hegemonic gender norms; these norms require them to be heterosex ually chaste and circumscribe their movements in settings that are coded as "public." Yet the dormitory is also a location in which female homoeroticism is produced through the intersections of social, eco nomic, and political interactions. The dormitory is, using Ara Wil son's phrase, a "generic" space—a space that is not specifically read as "queer" nor understood in its cultural context as a site of contes tation or resistance to normative orders.1 Queer, as figured through queer theory, implies an oppositional stance to normative orders of gender and sexuality and identifies moments in which heteronor mative assumptions regarding supposedly natural linkages between gender, the sexed body, and sexuality are destabilized. Ironically, as FeministStudies39, no. 2. © 2013 by Megan Sinnott 333 334 Megan Sinnott this article will argue, these moments may be thoroughly contained within gender normative structures such that homoeroticism and gender transgressions are produced in sites that are culturally sanc tioned for female and male homosociality. Generic spaces, rather than those that are explicitly situated as queer such as a gay bar, are key spaces in which queer modalities may thrive. Rather than pos iting a binary between queer and non-queer space, the concept of and focus on generic space can help us identify ways in which queer moments depend upon the usage of everyday gendered spatial norms. My analysis of generic spaces challenges a remarkably persistent refrain found in studies on same-sex sexuality and transgenderism: that across cultures, female forms of same-sex sexuality and transgen derism are rarely visible due to women's lack of access to public space. This article complements those texts that have noted and resisted the marginalization of women within this literature.2 More specifically, it builds on this previous work by exploring the relationship between the presumed rarity of female same-sex sexuality cross-culturally and cul tural conceptions of space. In particular, it examines the functioning of an uncritical application of a masculinist, Western-centric division of space into opposing spheres of public/private (or public/domestic) in which "public" is linked to visibility and sexual emancipation, a critique that is a long-existing project within feminist and anthro pological studies.3 Spaces that are not considered public, such as home spaces, may in fact be sites of same-sex eroticism, particularly although not exclusively for women. One such location, the all-female dormitory within Thailand, is an extension of culturally encoded home spaces — a kind of generic space—yet is produced through social relationships that are themselves embedded in global processes. Doreen Massey provides a useful framework for the exploration of space as a product of social relationships —political, economic, and social.4 Such a position helps us untangle problematic assumptions that underlie a paradigm that has structured queer and LGBT analy sis, specifically public/private dualisms, and linkages between queer ness, visibility, and liberation. For Massey, the division of space into public and private realms, each characterized by a set of assumptions, is an ideologically driven "imagining." The public is imagined as the site of political activity, but also as the site of global activity. Massey insightfully critiques these assumptions in her study in which she Megan Sinnott 335 compares the work and home spaces of workers in a scientific labora tory.5At firsther study appeared to confirm the familiar narrative of an open work location as a porous space at the intersection of global forces, in contrast to the safe, regulated, and supposedly closed space of home. However, Massey argued that on further analysis it became clear that...