Gender, Sexuality and Nationalism in a Northern Thai Non-governmental Organization

LeeRay Costa, Anthropology and Women's Studies, Hollins University

Post-Asian economic crisis Thailand was characterized by profound anxieties over modernization, globalization and threats to national sovereignty. These anxieties found expression in a proliferating nationalist discourse that pervaded a wide range of state, market and civil society arenas, including that of local NGOs. Drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork with the Project for Tomorrow (PFT), a small, village-based development NGO in northern Thailand, I examine the intersection of this nationalist rhetoric with NGO discourses and practices aimed at a two-year project to eliminate child prostitution. My analysis highlights in particular the gendered and sexualized aspects of this emergent post-crash nationalism and interrogates the ways that young women's bodies are deployed by PFT and others to reinforce both normative forms of gendered and sexual behavior, and the boundaries of "Thainess," including Thai morality, tradition and culture.

LeeRay Costa is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Women's Studies at Hollins University. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand on NGOs, development, gender and sexuality. She has worked for the Women's Studies Center at Chiang Mai University, the Asia-Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) and the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute (Chiang Mai). Dr. Costa has published on the topics of NGOs, women's education and activism, domestic violence, feminist pedagogy and narrative methodology. Her forthcoming co-authored book from Haworth Press is entitled Male Bodies, Women's Souls: Personal Narratives of Thailand's Transgendered Youth.

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