Pandora's Pot: The Monstrous Feminine, Sexuality and Horror in Contemporary Thai Cinema

Dr Rachel Harrison

Drawing on Barbara Creed’s study of the monstrous feminine in Western cinematic traditions, this seminar will undertake a gendered analysis of recent Thai horror films. The paper upon which this seminar is based proposes the feasibility of adopting psychoanalytical interpretations of the demonic or ghostly female figure in Thai cinema, despite the apparent “Eurocentricism” of these theoretical perspectives. To argue this case Dr Harrison refers in particular to notions of abjection, liminality and hybridity in an investigation of the anxieties that surround the feminine in the Thai horror genre.

The paper opens with a survey of the enduring myth of Nang Nak in its various and persistent cinematic representations, from slapstick comic-horror to the nostalgia, heritage cinema of Nonzee Nimibutr’s 1999 production, to cartoon depictions released in 2008. Dr Harrison then moves on to related analyses of the female ghost in the filmmaking of Yuthlert Sippapak, in his trilogy on Buppha Ratree (Ratree, Flower of the Night) and Kraseu Valentine (Valentine Ghost). Here Dr Harrison explores connections with Nang Nak as the ‘monstrous feminine’ prototype, and note how anxieties over the impact of globalization on contemporary Thai sexual mores are expressed through new hybrid forms of Thai and Western feminine monstrosities.

Bio

Rachel Harrison is Senior Lecturer in Thai Cultural Studies at SOAS, University of London. She has published widely on issues of gendered difference, sexuality, modern literature and cinema in Thailand as well as the comparative literature of South East Asia. She is co-founder of the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies and editor of South East Asia Research . She has recently published, in collaboration with Peter A. Jackson, an edited collection on The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Thailand with Hong Kong University Press and SEAP, Cornell and she is currently compiling an edited collection on new directions and frames of analysis in Thai literature. Two further volumes, evolving from the Ambiguous Allure of the West international research project funded by the AHRC, refer to the cultural relationship between Thailand and the West in terms of literary and cinematic developments: they are Roots of Comparison: Thai Literature and the West , and Mon-rak I-Pod: The Rise of New Thai Cinema .

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk