Ghostly Desires

Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyzes draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost. In these films the characters' eroticization in the spheres of loss and death represents an improvisation on the Buddhist disavowal of attachment and highlights under-recognized female and queer desire and persistence. Her feminist and queer readings reveal the entangled relationships between film, sexuality, Buddhist ideas, and the Thai state's regulation of heteronormative sexuality. Fuhrmann thereby provides insights into the configuration of contemporary Thailand while opening up new possibilities for thinking about queer personhood and femininity.

“"Through a bravura queering of Buddhist discourses of attachment, loss, and desire, Arnika Fuhrmann advances a deft and compelling critique of the limited framing of the current debates over state sexual regulation and queer and feminist advocacy in Thailand. Modeling how a queer feminist consideration of religion and film might proceed, this extraordinary book advances a queer critique of cinema that draws on Thai politics and counterdoctrinal uses of Buddhism. A brilliant book and an unquestionably major scholarly intervention, Ghostly Desires will galvanize the study of Thai cinema while taking the study of queer and political film more generally in new directions."”

“Ghostly Desires is about much more than Thai cinema. Fuhrmann pursues these diverse moving image-makers far beyond the nation’s moral-institutional architecture; and their “queering” of that architecture takes her far beyond the critical conventions of gender studies.” -- David Teh Pacific Affairs
"Ghostly Desires has indeed opened new conversations on the question of how the diverse genres of recent Thai cinema challenge us to refashion theory." -- Peter A. Jackson Journal of Southeast Asian Studies
"A deft and delicately defined analysis of the intersections between queer sexuality, vernacular Buddhist tenets and Thai cinema, tales and images." -- Rachel Harrison Sojourn
"Ghostly Desires has achieved a rare accomplishment in the field of Thai studies. It fuses innovative, postmodern theoretical sophistication with a rich grounding and expertise in the Thai cultural, historical, and aesthetic context." -- Megan Sinnott Sojourn
"Fuhrmann mines the rich materialist indexicality of ghosts to dazzling effect in her brilliant new study of queer sexuality and Buddhist-coded tropologies of desire . . . singularly impressive achievement that stages valuable interventions in competing interdisciplinary debates about cinema, religion, and sexual publics. . . . A dazzling debut from an important new voice in feminist, queer, and Asian cultural studies that deserves a wide and appreciative readership." -- Brett Farmer GLQ
"Brilliant ... Arnika Fuhrmann’s transdisciplinary approach is a perfect example of what the queering of area studies can look like and thus fits well with the idea of New Area Studies research and its goal to investigate situated differences and formulate mid-range concepts." -- Benjamin Baumann Journal of Asian Studies
"Ghostly Desires entreats viewers to cast their glance anew in the direction of cinema’s apparitions, mapping spectral desire along previously undetected coordinates of queerness and counternormativity. Its interdisciplinary orientation renders Ghostly Desires an essential contribution to scholarship across cinema studies, Southeast Asian studies, queer and affect theory, Buddhist studies, and beyond. Fuhrmann’s is a provocative and illuminating study rendered in a register no less haunting than its subject matter." -- Laura Isabel Serna and Mashinka Firunts Hakopian Journal of Cinema and Media Studies

Arnika Fuhrmann is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell University.

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