Engendering History: Gender, Sexuality, and Love in Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia

Ashley Thompson suggests an engendering of history that bears "the potential to make history, literally and figuratively, insofar as it threatens or promises to upset established notions of the field" (2008:106). This panel took up Thompson’s call to engender history and interrogated dominant conceptions of gender, sexuality, and love in modern Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia. From texts to textiles, classrooms to forests, and wedding photos to state records, the papers focused on particular spaces and materials that vibrated with social and political intensities through the long period of the Cold War in Thailand, Lao PDR, and Cambodia. The panel showed how materiality and spatiality were key aspects that shaped the ideological extremes that manifested in violence and unrest in Southeast Asia, and the panel began its inquiries in the 1950s.  

 

Alexandra Dalferro - "Weaving Queer Pasts and Futures in Thailand"  

Chairat Polmuk - "Of Eros and the Forest: The Topography of Love in Lao Revolutionary Literature"  Catriona Miller - "Sewing Patterns and Visions of Democracy: Khmer Women Organizing during Decolonization (1948 – 1952)"

 

 

ALEXANDRA DALFERRO is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. She is currently writing her dissertation about the politics and practices of sericulture and silk weaving in Surin, Thailand, and she pays particular attention to the sensory and affective dimensions of these processes. Her fieldwork was supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation and the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad program, and for the 2019-2020 academic year, she was a Mellon Graduate Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. Alexandra likes to weave and to sew and to think about how craft and art intersect with daily life.   

 

CHAIRAT POLMUK teaches Southeast Asian languages and literature, cultural theory, and media studies at the Department of Thai, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He received a PhD in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture from Cornell in 2018. His doctoral project titled, “Atmospheric Archives: Post-Cold War Affect and the Buddhist Temporal Imagination in Southeast Asian Literature and Visual Culture,” received the 2018 Lauriston Sharp Prize for best dissertation.   

 

CATRIONA MILLER is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Her dissertation, Gendering the Cambodian State (1900 – 1970) utilizes transnational feminist methods to recast the political history of Cambodia during the transition from a French Protectorate to a neutral Buddhist nation-state. She conducted this research with generous funding from the NSEP Boren Fellowship and Center for Khmer Studies Fellowship.    

 

ARNIKA FUHRMANN is an interdisciplinary scholar of Southeast Asia, working at the intersections of the region’s aesthetic, religious, and political modernities. She is an associate professor of Asian Studies at Cornell University and the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema (Duke University Press, 2016).