Schoolgirls' sexualities, media and popular culture in Chiang Mai City, Thailand

Abstract

In the globalizing cities of Thailand, increased exposure to capitalism, media, popular culture and urban lifestyle has become an integral part of Thai youth lifestyles which has led to a dramatic change in the way Thai youth in the city, especially females, perceive and practice their sexuality and sexual relationships in everyday life. This phenomenon has generated immense public concern and panic, as teenagers are seen to have challenged certain assumed moral standards and traditional Thai values. Therefore teenagers are frequently blamed as a threat to Thai society and the established order. There are various ways in which the Thai state and its social institutions operate to control, regulate, and suppress young Thai women’s sexuality. This multi-sited ethnographic research among a group of thirteen schoolgirls aged 18-21 years in Chiang Mai city aims to explore the control mechanisms of Thai conventional sexual discourses mediated through various social institutions. At the same time, the study analyses the ways these girls creatively and proactively ‘make do’ with media, popular culture, urban space and consumer society in order to appropriate, negotiate, contest, or reject the dominant sexual discourses they encounter in everyday life. Taking the girls’ point of view, this study argues that, as active cultural agents, young Thai girls are engaged in the work of appropriating, transforming, negotiating, and reconstructing discourses of sexuality they encounter in order to construct their own sexual selves, regardless of whether these values constrain or enable their self and sexual expressions. This mode of self-construction and transformation must be understood and situated in particular cultural contexts that give meaning to such processes.