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Double Hauntings and Disturbing Colonisation through the Body of Buppha Ratree

Fri, March 17, 5:15 to 7:15pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: 4th Floor, Forest Hill

Abstract

Drawing on the popular Thai horror movie Buppha Ratree, Flower of the Night (dir. Yuthlert Sippapak, 2003), this paper develops the double meaning of the term “haunting femininity”. It examines femininity as an agential force, actively engaged in an aggressive haunting process. And it reads this haunting as a gesture of resistance to the forms of Thai masculinity that strive to colonise the female body. Buppha both haunts and is haunted by codes of practice for “good” female behaviour, of which her body become symbol and metaphor in the movie that bears her name. The movie’s setting – almost entirely in the space of the lower-middle class, Bangkok housing block Oscar Apartment – serves as a re-animated expression of haunting and haunted female body/corpse. The paper attends to the internally colonising dimensions of rural-urban and cross-class interactions as they are presented in the movie, and reads the film’s mis-en-scène as an exploration of both resistance to and re-inscription of culturally embedded forms of power.

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