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COPYRIGHT 2003 Women's Studies Center
Anjaree is the only Thai organization specifically targeting women who love women. Headquartered in Bangkok, it has members throughout Thailand, providing information, encouraging community formation, and sponsoring social events for Thai women who love women. In Thai, Anjaree means "women who follow nonconformist ways." Despite the organization's entrenchment among Thailand's women who love women-it has existed for over a decade and boasts a membership of over 500-its founder, spokesperson, and leader, Anjana Suvarananda, complains that she is at a loss for words, in Thai and in English, that adequately describes her identity as a woman who loves women following nonconformist ways. At the Sixth International Conference for Thai Studies, she presented a new Thai word that she created, yingrakying, hoping it will circulate as a new word for women "who have erotic feelings or love feelings for other women." While Anjana often invokes file word lesbian when portraying herself and members of her organization to farang (Westerners), she avoids the term if given the opportunity to describe the site specific situation in Thailand. When speaking in Thai and to Thai people, she resists using the word lesbian. Though widely understood, many Thais, including those involved in women-centered relationships, consider it vulgar and derogatory. When talking to Thais, Anjana employs and revises the commonly used Thai words for women who love women. Rather than perpetuating the use of these established terms and the stereotypes that accompany them, Anjana addresses the changing situations of Thai women who love women. At this meeting she stated: "We are not sure if this [new] term will go down well or if this will be the term we stick to or not. We are in the process of building our own culture and terminologies" (Suvarananda "Lesbianism").
The motivation to formulate a new word is partially attributable to Anjana's experience with cultures outside Thailand. She spent time studying at the Hague, had access to Western ideas, and speaks almost fluent English. These extensive experiences inform her attempts to affect community formation by broadening the community's way of conceptualizing itself and its individual members. Yingrakying literally means "woman-loves-woman" in Thai, originating from the erase currently en vogue with Western women-centered organizers and academics: "women who love women." Rather than adopting the English word and using it in Thai in the manner the word lesbian was employed, Anjana reformulates this phrase in order to match her own intentions through translation and transformation. In this case, knowledge of the English language and farang ideas become tools rather than models for linguistic community formation. Her word becomes a strategy for interaction and community building that encourages shifting the way women imagine themselves according to changing circumstances. Yingrakying is more than a convenient new word to name something heretofore ignored-it signals an awareness of the effects of a global Western-based movement that is personalized for this increasingly outward looking Thai community.
By considering, as the editors of the special issue of Social Text, entitled "Queer Transexions," hold, "the interrelations of sexuality, race, and gender in a transnational context." I attempt "to bring the projects of queer, postcolonial, and critical race theories together" (Harper et al. 1). In the past decade feminist, sex, and gender theories have addressed the erasure of specific bodies in terms of race and class of individuals located in the West. Even more recently, work has begun that extends this theorizing beyond Western culture and location and retheorizes according to localized situations. Hence the notion of sexual identity is being complicated, but universalized assumptions of identity formation are still frequently applied unproblematically to non-Western cultures. As Dennis Altman explains, "It has become fashionable to point to the emergence of "the global gay,' the apparent internationalization of a certain form of social and cultural identity based on homosexuality" ("Rupture" 77). While this "global gay" image is being produced by both the West and the East, and its embodiment can be seen at times in Bangkok, an international gay/lesbian is a fictive construction that has no literal embodiment, nor is it manifest in all social, political, and cultural contexts. Rather than mapping Western histories and theories unproblematically onto Thai bodies, new explanations based on the situations in Thailand must be devised. Examining the shifts in identity formation by a group of women existing in the heretofore geographic and sexual margins reveals the effects of the "globalization" of information and economies. Arjun Appadurai asserts that "[t]he new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex. overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models." He proposes that the relationship between five terms, or landscapes, that he creates establishes a framework for looking at these global cultural flows (Modernity 33).
Peter Jackson, Rosalind Morris. Thook Thook Thongthiraj, and Dennis Altman practice expanding the ways in which global and local cultures in Thailand are understood. reevaluating the usefulness of using Western theories of identification to describe Thai notions of sexuality. They look specifically at Thai history and chart changing representations of sexualities in response to cultural events. This chapter extends this work, examining the shifting positions of women in Bangkok over the past decade as a result of increasing opportunities for education and financial stability. It presents varied and conflicting accounts by yingrakying that delineate previously available positions, and then shows how Anjana and Anjaree suggest new possibilities through the creation of words and communities.
Anjaree's function as a social club where women could meet women provided the impetus for my increasing involvement during my tenure of research in Bangkok. I initially joined Anjaree for social reasons, having learned about it from another American woman living in Thailand. The Thai women who loved women that I knew who were not members of Anjaree were either friends from my previous stay in Thailand or friends of friends. I conducted interviews in May, June, and October 1996. Some of the examples cited occurred while socializing during the eight months previous to my decision to consider these interactions part of my research. Most contemporary ethnographic research combines these formal and informal procedures and methods for gathering information. While Carol, an American researcher who contributed to this study, asserts that socializing, pursuing relationships, and creating unusual or startling situations by asking abrupt questions or purposely violating Thai practices is integral and productive to her work, I employed more formal procedures, acquiring most of my information through interviews that took place, for the most part, in English. As...
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