Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Emi Donald from Cornell University, who will discuss the distinction between tomboy and transman identities in Thailand. Emi Donald is a PhD candidate in History Department at Cornell University. 

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

This talk will explore and analyze how tomboy (thom in Thai) and transman came to constitute two distinct but bounded modes of embodiment in contemporary Thailand. From the mid-2000s onwards, Thai transmen gained wider social recognition, partly, I argue, by publicly distinguishing themselves from the older idea of thom. For many outspoken transmen celebrities and activists in Thailand, thom was too closely associated with women who “dress as men” but do not desire or strive for the kinds of bodily and social transitions that these high-profile transmen pursued. The distinction hinged upon the body and an individual’s desire or capacity to put the body through changes, particularly hormonal and surgical changes. Produced and circulated through different kinds of knowledge, such as memoir, guidebooks, activist and public health literature, celebrity interviews, as well as academic scholarship, thom and transman were newly defined in the 2010s as not just distinct identities or philosophies of self, but as fundamentally different bodies, different material modes of inhabiting and knowing the body. As distinct as these bodies were and remain, however, they often travel together, bound up in the narratives of life and discovery that people tell about themselves. I describe this conceptual copresence as the (un)binding relationship between thom and trans bodies; thom and transman are bound to each other in experience and personal history but also repel each other according to newly founded modes of knowing the body.

About the Speaker

Emi Donald is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Cornell University. Their dissertation traces the historical foundations of Thailand’s contemporary LGBTQ+ movement by focusing on the public representation, activist agendas, and life stories of Thai thom (tomboys), women-loving-women feminists, and transmen. Donald also writes and teaches on topics related to colonial and nationalist regimes of gender and sexuality, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements in Asia, and public history and archival praxis in the Global South.