'Fun, Games and Gains' in Bangkok Unlicensed Guide: Thai (Male)–Farang (Female) Sexual Encounters in 1970s Semi-Fiction. (December 2015)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- 'Fun, Games and Gains' in Bangkok Unlicensed Guide: Thai (Male)–Farang (Female) Sexual Encounters in 1970s Semi-Fiction. (December 2015)
- Main Title:
- 'Fun, Games and Gains' in Bangkok Unlicensed Guide: Thai (Male)–Farang (Female) Sexual Encounters in 1970s Semi-Fiction
- Authors:
- Feangfu, Janit
- Abstract:
- This article investigates cross-cultural encounters from the point of view of a local man who tries to gain the upper hand in power negotiations in the context of tourism. Through titillating narratives, he constructs 'white women' as 'loose', a stereotype which remains prevalent in Thai male perceptions of Western women in the twenty-first century. The article looks at selected semi-fiction from the 1972 collection Kai-phi Bangkok chut 1 ( Bangkok Unlicensed Guide Collection 1 ) by Ta Tha-it in its capacity as a representative of the 'lowbrow' genre of 'male writing for male reading'. Exploring the narratives of sexual encounters between a local tour guide and Western women, it examines the sexualization of the farang (Western) body as a strategy for 'fun, games and gains' in cross-cultural sexual encounters. In the three stories discussed, the sexualized farang bodies turn out to be homosexual, masochistic and aged respectively, while the Thai body is hetero-normative, young and virile. The entire collection from which this analysis is drawn was composed in the 1970s against the backdrop of Cold War Thailand as an emerging tourist destination for US soldiers in Indochina and of the rise of international tourism in Thailand.
- Is Part Of:
- South East Asia research. Volume 23:Number 4(2015:Dec.)
- Journal:
- South East Asia research
- Issue:
- Volume 23:Number 4(2015:Dec.)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 23, Issue 4 (2015)
- Year:
- 2015
- Volume:
- 23
- Issue:
- 4
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2015-0023-0004-0000
- Page Start:
- 521
- Page End:
- 534
- Publication Date:
- 2015-12
- Subjects:
- lowbrow literature -- white women as sexualized bodies -- gender and power negotiation -- Thai literature -- Cold War
Southeast Asia -- Periodicals
Southeast Asia
Periodicals
959.005 - Journal URLs:
- http://ser.sagepub.com/ ↗
https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rsou20/current ↗
http://www.uk.sagepub.com/home.nav ↗ - DOI:
- 10.5367/sear.2015.0281 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0967-828X
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - BLDSS-3PM
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 7292.xml