Queering intra-Asia migrations: an analysis of Southeast Asian queer/trans migrants living in Bangkok, Thailand

This thesis examines the migration experiences of Southeast Asian queer/trans migrants in Bangkok, Thailand. Using participant observation, qualitative interviews, and online surveying, it critically unpacks the role sexualities and genders play as relations of ruling shaping and influencing the migration processes and modes of incorporation of Southeast Asian queer/trans migrants in Bangkok. There has been an increasing number of scholarly works investigating the migratory dynamics of queer/trans people in recent years. However, movements within the southern hemisphere remain largely neglected to the benefit of South-to-North migratory flows, with existing queer/trans migration scholarships embedded within postcolonialist considerations. This study thus provides a positive contribution to the field of queer/trans migration studies through an ethnographic analysis of intra-Asia queer/trans migrations. By sitting at the crossroads between migration and queer/trans debates in Southeast Asia, it also contributes to both discussions.

Using a queer/trans materialist standpoint, this study looks at the ways processes of gendered racialisation, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, homonormativity, homonationalism, or transnormativity shape Southeast Asian queer/trans migrants' everyday experiences and social interactions through migrations. Particularly, this examination uncovers (1) the place of Thailand as a migration destination of lust for sexual and gender minorities across Southeast Asia and how queer/trans migrants’ mobile journeys interlace with their sexual and gender journeys in ways that result in new migratory desires, (im)possibilities, and trajectories that do not necessarily lead to the West; (2) the labour of homemaking queer/trans migrants engage in in places and spaces that expand beyond material and physical confines to find a sense of place in the world despite living in emplaced displacement; (3) the role the global political economy, relations of power, and social positioning play in influencing queer/trans migrants’ opportunities and inequalities in Bangkok; (4) the various acts of agency and space-making queer/trans migrants engage in to negotiate the forces of marginalisation, domination, and erasure they encounter through migrations; (5) and the intertwining relationship between queer/trans migrations and digital media, with the latter facilitating all stages of queer/trans migrants’ mobile journey to Bangkok.

Finally, carried out during the COVID-19 global pandemic, this study highlights the reflexive nature of ethnography, which must constantly be adapted and readapted to its unsettling environment. By dematerialising and deterritorialising fieldwork, it also questions the very core of ethnography – that is, the necessity for ethnographers to be physically present in the field.