Where Health and Beauty Meet: Femininity and Racialisation in Thai Cosmetic Surgery Clinics
2009; Routledge; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/10357820903153707
ISSN1467-8403
Autores Tópico(s)Culinary Culture and Tourism
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments This paper developed from material presented at the Tenth Annual Thai Studies Conference in Bangkok, January 2008. It was further honed through the 'Globalised Bodies, Embodied Globalisations' workshop at the University of Melbourne in August 2008. I am grateful for the generosity of numerous interlocutors, including Prempreeda Pramoj na Ayutthaya, Vera Mackie, Fran Martin, Andrea Whittaker, Bobby Benedicto, Peter Jackson and others. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for Asian Studies Review, whose helpful suggestions I have tried to incorporate. Notes 1. Kathoey refers to male-to-female transgender or transsexual categories (Jackson, 2003c, para 2), but historically it has many different connotations, including male homosexuality, a third sex or gender [phet-thi-sam], and cross-dressers who are assigned male or female at birth (Jackson, 1997, p. 171; Jackson, 2003 Jackson, Peter. 2003. "Performative genders, perverse desires: A bio-history of Thailand's same-sex and transgender cultures". In Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context Vol. 9, Available at http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue9/jackson.html, accessed 4 June 2008 [Google Scholar]). The widely used term Ladyboy is a Thai coinage of English words to signify kathoey. Sao praphet sorng, which I use later in this essay, is a Thai term meaning "second type of woman". It is used by many gender variant Thais to identify themselves in preference to speaking of kathoey. Kathoey connotes multiply in Thai as psychiatrically pathologising, as derogatory popular slang, and sometimes as an ironic reappropriation of pathologising or derogatory meanings. 2. An anonymous reviewer furnished me with this neat summary of the broad project that this essay attempts, for which I am very appreciative. 3. Following the conventions of transgender studies, in this essay I use the term "trans woman" or "trans women" to refer to individuals known in mainstream or archaic contexts as male-to-female or MTF transsexuals. 4. Marx's idea of the commodity fetish theorises that, within the dynamic of exchange we call capitalism, objects acquire a meaning that alienates the consumer of an object from its producer. Further, the object confers its consumer or owner psychically with particular forms of power – for example, prestige, popularity, charm, and so on. See Marx (1976 Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Volume One, London: Penguin. trans. Ben Fowkes [Google Scholar], pp. 164–65). 5. Somatechnics is also the name of a research centre affiliated with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. See http://www.somatechnics.mq.edu.au/about/, accessed 31 January 2009. 6. "Somatechnical capital" thus extends Bourdieu's notion of cultural, social and symbolic capital rather than referring to capital in the narrow Marxian sense. 7. This concept emerged as part of a discussion about embodiment, globalisation and commodification at the 'Globalised Bodies, Embodied Globalisation in the Asia Pacific Region' workshop at the University of Melbourne in August 2008. I am grateful to Audrey Yue and Mark McLelland for mentioning forms of capital and somatechnics in the same space, allowing me to make this connection, and for the productive discussion that followed. 8. In this essay I use GRS (gender reassignment surgery) rather than SRS (sex reassignment surgery) or sex affirmation surgery, in keeping with a critical perspective that gender is performative and makes legible the somatic "realness" of sex. See Butler (1993 Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex, New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], p. 2). 9. Trans theory is a growing discipline within studies of sexuality and gender that takes as its object gender variant, transgender and transsexual practices, politics, identities and culture. See More (1999 More, Kate. 1999. "Trans theory in the UK". In Reclaiming genders: Transsexual grammars at the fin de siecle, Edited by: More, Kate and Whittle, Stephen. 240–284. London: Cassell. [Google Scholar], p. 240) and Stryker (2006 Stryker, Susan. 2006. "(De)subjugated knowledges: An introduction to transgender studies". In The transgender studies reader, Edited by: Stryker, Susan and Whittle, Stephen. 1–18. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar], pp. 1–18). 10. For a discussion of the theoretical field comparing various trans and cosmetic surgical practices and a critique of Davis's point here, see Sullivan (2006 Sullivan, Nikki. 2006. "Transmogrification: (Un)becoming other(s)". In The transgender studies reader, Edited by: Stryker, Susan and Whittle, Stephen. 552–564. New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar], pp. 553–56). 11. See www.sexchangecenter.com, accessed 12 January 2008. The acronym MTF (or MtF) is used in some contexts as an abbreviation of "Male to Female". As I note above, ''trans woman'' or ''trans women'' is my preferred usage in this article. 12. For a more detailed analysis of the Thai gender reassignment medical travel market than I can do justice to here, see Aizura (2009a Aizura, Aren. 2009a. "The romance of the amazing scalpel: "Race", labour and affect in Thai gender reassignment clinics". In Queer Bangkok, Edited by: Jackson, Peter A. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. forthcoming [Google Scholar]). 13. On medical tourism in Thailand, see Whittaker (2008 Whittaker, Andrea. 2008. Pleasure and pain: Medical travel in Asia. Global Public Health, 3(3): 271–290. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]) and Connell (2006 Connell, John. 2006. Medical tourism: Sea, sun, sand … and surgery. Tourism Management, 27(6): 1093–1100. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). 14. My comments here draw on fieldwork undertaken for my PhD thesis on transsexuality and travel. See Aizura (2009a Aizura, Aren. 2009a. "The romance of the amazing scalpel: "Race", labour and affect in Thai gender reassignment clinics". In Queer Bangkok, Edited by: Jackson, Peter A. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. forthcoming [Google Scholar]). 15. The name Melanie is a pseudonym. 16. Elsewhere I make a more complex reading of Melanie's tattoo as a form of personal ritual. See Aizura (2009b Aizura, Aren. 2009b. Transgender surgical tourism in Thailand: Paradoxes of community. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 28(4) forthcoming [Google Scholar]). 17. While Miss Alcazar and Miss Purple Crown are two examples of kathoey beauty pageants whose winners generally pass as very feminine, graceful and delicate women, other large kathoey beauty pageants actively resist this norm of "feminine realness". The annual Miss ACDC pageant, for example, judges contestants on their wit and "being themselves", and was described to me as more a "gay queen" competition. Often the final decision of the judges has been to crown larger, darker-skinned contestants with the Miss ACDC crown. 18. Sao praphet sorng literally means "second type of woman" in Thai and is used by many gender variant people in Thailand who disidentify with the medicalising or derogatory significations of kathoey. 19. "Under erasure" is a Derridean term to denote using a word when it does not quite fit, but acknowledging the impossibility of finding the "correct" word or pinning down meaning absolutely. In Of Grammatology, for a term to be under erasure means that it appears with a strike-through or crossed out to signify its ineligibility; even so, the word appears and makes meaning(s). See Derrida (1976 Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of grammatology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. xv). 20. Michael Taussig, 'Beauty and the Beast', paper delivered at the Contemporary Societies and Cultures Seminar Series in Anthropology, Gender Studies and Social Theory, 16 July 2008, University of Melbourne, Australia. 21. I am grateful to Fran Martin for suggesting I make this particular connection between gender, modernity and consumption. For readings on gender and consumption, see the discussion of consumerism and femininity in the twentieth century in Felski (1995 Felski, Rita. 1995. The gender of modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], pp. 61–90) and the volume on gender and consumption edited by Casey and Martens (2007 Casey, Emma and Martens, Lydia. 2007. Gender and consumption: Domestic cultures and the commercialisation of everyday life, London: Ashgate. [Google Scholar]).
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