queer worlds

Sex, then, is something that is fashioned, negotiated, practiced, and enacted. The apparent simplicity of the question "is this a girl or a boy?" conceals the fact that to ask the question, one must already know what boys and girls are.

INTERVIEWER: The visual portraits in Femmes of Power are potentially problematic. Do you think such works can attach too high an importance to surface appearance? DLGV: A consequence of the visual propaganda we have all been subjected to is that we automatically ‘read’ images of feminine women in a particular way and make assumptions about her gender, sexuality and availability for cultural consumption. I don’t believe that words alone can provide an alternative way of visualizing what it means to be female, femme or feminine in today’s world. UD: Yes, and it’s also important to know that this is a rare book because it gives equal weight to image and text – and very few publishers are willing to produce such books! That said, if you read the text, you will learn that the ways that our subjects queer femininity is about a lot more than aesthetics or visuals – it is about who it is done for – that is, about desire and relationships, the activist and creative work that they do, and so on.

"So what does it mean that a femme identified female born woman gets mistaken for a drag queen? That overdoing femininity makes you appear more masculine or wearing masculine clothing makes you appear more feminine? If a trans-woman like Josephine finds a model for femininity in A Femme's Guide to The Universe and a femme learns femininity from drag queens who in turn are often seen as imitating 'real women'? Who is really imitating who?"

[Zoe] was forced to relate to the outside world through the structural inequalities of a racially ordered society, which cemented her group membership around Blackness. It was not until much later that she came to understand how her same-sex desires played a role in how she fit into the world. . .Sexuality and gender presentation together served to create a social identity for her as a lesbian. So both Zoe's individual and her collective identities have race at their core: her identity is structural as well as relational.

I learned thickly about [my interlocuter/informant Juliette] and my own construction of sexuality.

“An important difference between gay men and dees is that dees are only dees in their relation to a tom. The masculine female gives the dee her identity, whereas gay men take pains to distinguish their community and identities from kathoey identity. Gay men form sexual identities based on their mutual attraction to other men...Both mainstream commentators and toms and dees themselves assert that dees are looking for friendship, companionship, and caring from toms. In my research I rarely found a dee who would link sexual desire with her deeness.”

Tolerance denotes a preparedness to endure, put up with, or permit to exist, but does not necessarily imply the lack of criticism of the favorable or approving attitude connoted by acceptance. It is possible to tolerate something even while considering it inappropriate, misdirected, or wrong.

Toms share with kathoeys, transgendered/transsexual males, a discourse of "suffering" from an inability to achieve true maleness or femaleness. Thai gay men have also appropriated this discourse of suffering to describe their difficulties in finding social acceptance and satisfying relationships.

Jackson (1999b, 229) makes the useful distinction between “tolerance” and “acceptance” of homosexuality in the Thai context: “Tolerance denotes a preparedness to endure, put up with, or permit to exist, but does not necessarily imply the lack of criticism or the favorable or approving attitude connoted by acceptance. It is possible to tolerate something even while considering it inappropriate, misdirected, or wrong.”

"[The] popularity of using derivations of English for new identities, found frequently throughout the world, does not mean that the new term carries the same meaning as the original English word."

"While virginity and monogamy are prized, the women learn to brave judgments about promiscuity and to calculate their bodies, services, and attentions in terms of cash. In these ways, the workers absorb the lessons that their racial, economic, and gender subordination (or their performance as subordinates) can provide a source of income and also that they can contract their erotic and affectional intimacy according to specific amounts of time and money."

... arguments that frame protections of LGBT people or their access to marriage as 'special rights' proves persuasive to rural constituents. It is not their hatred of queers that motivates them -- although surely that is motivation enough... rural voters who reject recognition of LGBT rights telegraph their own feelings of economic vulnerability, lack of access to social-welfare benefits, and reliance on the material more than the symbolic preciousness of marriage to span the gaps in a woefully threadbare social safety net.

Many of the younger visitors wear baseball hats, and even more are in tshirts decorated with brand logos such as Harley Davidson and Calvin Klein, team insignia, and English phrases, which at times appear random, such as the safe sex message worn by a tom vendor one day.The styles presented are defined in relation to international fashions heavily weighted toward American themes, such as 'heavy,' from heavy metal and Harley Davidson style, and 'young professional.' There are no tshirts with Thai writing.