Reviewed by: Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema by Arnika Fuhrmann Laura Isabel Serna and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian (bio) Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema by Arnika Fuhrmann. Duke University Press. 2016. $94.95 hardcover; $24.95 paperback; e-book available. 272 pages. In Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema, Arnika Fuhrmann materializes the apparitions summoned in Thai cinema after 1997, recoding spectral protagonists as figures of nonnormative desire who resist both doctrinal Buddhism and the state regulation of minoritized sexuality. Fuhrmann revisits sites of cinematic haunting and horror to assemble their specters under the rubric of “Buddhist melancholia,” a term denoting the Buddhist-coded tendency to eroticize loss in Thai cinema. Across Fuhrmann’s five dazzling case studies, apparitions surface as queer, feminist, and trans-identity avatars whose posthumous desires refuse prescriptive heterofamilial structures of longing. Spanning a heterogeneous array of works, each chapter of Ghostly Desires is devoted to a discrete genre of cinematic production. The heritage genre is examined through Nonzee Nimibutr’s Nang Nak (1999); Hong Kong–Thai coproduced horror through Danny and Oxide Pang’s The Eye (2002); independent cinema through Apichat-pong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady (Sat Pralat, 2004); video art through Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s corpus; and queer documentary through Thunska Pansitthivorakul’s This Area Is under Quarantine (2008). While these works are demarcated from one another by distinct generic boundaries, they each foreground counternormative longings [End Page 183] that either issue from or direct themselves at bodies exceeding the category of the human. In the process, they trouble recent nationalist policies seeking to articulate notions of citizenship through narrowly defined models of sexual personhood. As Fuhrmann compellingly argues, it is here that ghostly cinema’s critical possibilities lie: in the attempt to “redefine frameworks of resolution for cases of minoritarian injury, and reimagine trajectories of attachment.”1 A broad spectrum of disciplinary discourses is brought to bear on this subject matter, each deployed with virtuosic deftness. To chart the intersections of recent cinematic narratives with Buddhist ontologies, Fuhrmann turns to the newly instantiated national emphasis on “sufficiency” as an instance of Buddhist-coded economic policy.2 Theravadin soteriology also figures prominently within the text, a salvation doctrine that uses the image of the female body’s decomposition as a pedagogical aid to admonish against worldly attachment. Fuhrmann extends this examination to consider how female, queer, and kathoey (translated by Fuhrmann as transgender or trans-identity) subjects are accorded a karmically assigned “diminished personhood” in the contemporary Thai imaginary, echoing a vernacular Buddhism fused with liberal political formations in what Fuhrmann calls a Buddhist-liberal synthesis.3 A particularly incisive example of this phenomenon is furnished in the first chapter’s analysis of Nang Nak, whose ghostly protagonist continues to experience desire for her lover beyond the event of her own death. Although the legend of Nang Nak serves as source material for more than two dozen filmic adaptations, Fuhrmann identifies Nonzee Nimibutr’s 1999 adaptation as distinct in its dual focus on the themes of desire and Buddhist detachment. In Nimibutr’s version, Nak alternately appears as an emblem of Thai feminine ideality and a cadaver in the process of decay. Fuhrmann links this latter manifestation to the Buddhist story of Vāsavadattā, a courtesan whose “desire for pleasurable equity” was denied in a narrative that culminated with her bodily dismemberment.4 Advancing a feminist reading of Nang Nak, Fuhrmann considers Buddhist object lessons regarding the “repulsiveness” of feminine corporeality in a national context marked by the Ministry of the Interior’s programmatic surveillance of women’s bodies.5 As this example illustrates, Ghostly Desires is also crucially concerned with tracing the shifting landscape of social and cultural policy in Thailand following the financial crisis of 1997. As Fuhrmann describes it, in the post-1997 milieu of state disciplinary programs, “bodies became a last national good . . . and sexuality became an increasingly central component of citizenship.”6 Attending to recent practices of “cultural monitoring” undertaken by the Ministry of Culture, Fuhrmann shows how the state’s performance of discipline, prohibition, and regulation unofficially banned [End Page 184] queer desire...
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Sep 3, 2018
Valentin Noble 
Open Access