Spatialising Thai masculinities: negotiating dominance and subordination in Southern Thailand

This paper explores the entanglement of gender with class and national identities by investigating the politics of intra-national migration in Thailand. Focusing on the experiences of a group of young Thai men who have migrated from the Thai mainland to the island of Koh Pha-ngan in Southern Thailand, this research outlines the ways in which these young men are able to resist wider Thai discourses that seek to position them as marginal national subjects through their work in the tourism industry. I argue that the economic importance of the tourism industry opens up possibilities for the performance of masculine subjectivities which would otherwise be subject to surveillance and censure. This greater freedom enables experimentation with new gendered identities as well as access to sexual encounters with women that the men would not ordinarily meet: comparatively wealthy, educated, middle-class tourist women. Such encounters can open up possibilities which enable the men to re-negotiate their positioning in wider Thai society, and thereby challenge the marginalised identity labels that are ascribed to them.