front cover of Ghostly Desires
Ghostly Desires
Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema
Arnika Fuhrmann
Duke University Press, 2016
Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.
[more]

logo for Duke University Press
In the Mood for Texture
The Revival of Bangkok as a Chinese City
Arnika Fuhrmann
Duke University Press, 2026
In the Mood for Texture considers the revival of Chinese pasts and the aesthetics of colonial modernity in contemporary Southeast Asian cultural production, both virtual and material. By analyzing how twentieth-century Shanghai and Hong Kong have been revived in modern Bangkok’s architecture, design, fashion, and nightlife, Arnika Fuhrmann shows how Chinese pasts are redeployed in contemporary film, literature, and hospitality venues to shape present visions of Asia. At the heart of this inquiry stand Shanghai and Hong Kong’s anomalous colonial temporalities and Thailand’s semi-colonial temporality of the “never” and “yet still” of colonization. Attending to the textures of built environments and agentive female subjects, Fuhrmann reconceptualizes the revival of Bangkok's Chinese pasts and demonstrates how Southeast Asian imaginations can challenge both domestic and diasporic narratives of identity and collectivity beyond China.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter