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A. Gordon, J. Radway (1996)
Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
BOOKS IN BRIEF 563 Brett Farmer Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema Arnika Fuhrmann Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. xii + 255 pp. In her classic sociological study of haunting, Avery Gordon suggests that ghosts, routinely dismissed as vestigial hangovers of premodern superstition, function as vital elements of contemporary social life. As obscene figures of liminal otherness, ghosts index the vast and often violent exclusions of modernity, reanimating the lost, conjuring the invisible, speaking the unutterable, and, generally, refiguring the taken-for-granted operations of social reality. “The ghost is not simply a dead or missing person,” she writes, “but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life” (Gordon 1997: 8). Arnika 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 in contemporary Thai cinema. After years of relative decline, Thai film experienced a marked renaissance in the turbulent historical aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis that hit regional economies hard, Thailand in particular. The diverse corpus of film work that ensued — often denominated the New Thai
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies – Duke University Press
Published: Oct 1, 2018
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