The Transitioning Nation-State and Transgender Rights in Thailand

• In Event: 1480 - Section on Sociology of Sexualities Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Sexuality and Space

Abstract

Thai transgender women who work in the entertainment industry do more than sing, dance, and showcase their beauty on stage; their image is also used in official state brochures to promote Thailand as a medical hub. Since the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the Thai state has launched new strategies to advance medical tourism, or health-related travel, and has become known as a global center for Gender Reassignment Surgeries (GRS). At the same time, Thai transgender women have taken on highly visible roles in cabarets and beauty pageants, often using hormones and surgeries to qualify as beautiful and gain economic/social mobility. Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork and over 50 in-depth interviews with Thai transgender women, state officials, doctors, hospital executives, medical tourism facilitators, and civil society members, this research analyzes how medical tourism impacts economic growth, nation-building, and Thai transgender women. I argue that medical tourism is co-constructed in Thailand by the transgender entertainment industry, in which Thai transgender women circulate ideals of sex, gender, and the technologically-enhanced body on a global stage. I build on the transnational feminist aim to deconstruct the sexual and gendered politics of the state by analyzing how and why the state’s medical hub policies augment and are augmented by Thai transgender women. I elucidate how medical tourism is a technology of the state that transforms and relies on local configurations of gender, embodiment, and labor; medical tourism also impacts Thailand’s nation-building and political growth through its “Amazing Thailand” brand campaign. Bridging grounded insights with macro systems analysis, the research furthers our understandings of how health, gender, embodiment and labor roles are assembled by and shaping the global medical market – with deep impacts on state economic growth and nation-branding.

Author

• Rebecca Farber, Boston University