Abstract
In Thailand, there is an adage that a woman's vagina is her rice paddy wherein it is considered a natural resource she can harvest when necessary or desired. In a culture where sexual relationships are defined by norms of masculinity and femininity, women's sexual decisions are often aimed at using this natural resource to perform femininity in culturally idealized ways. Through ethnographic work in commercial sex establishments, this chapter argues that heterosexual sex practices help women express and enact hegemonic femininities in Northern Thailand. In contributing to the literature on hegemonic and multiple femininities, the chapter contends that gender is relational and that analyses of men's performances of masculinities are insufficient if reviewed separately from women’s performances of femininities.
Keywords: femininities, gender, masculinities, Thailand, moralities, Sexuality
Introduction
Forty-year-old Hansa lives in the same community where she grew up, a small rural area surrounded by farmland and rice paddies on the outskirts of Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand. Hansa is a successful small business owner and manager. It is her day off, so she cleans the house and folds laundry for her husband and two children. While Hansa says housekeeping is traditionally a woman's task in Northern Thailand, her husband cleans the house on his days off too. Married once before to the Japanese father of her children, her husband is her childhood sweetheart whom she reconnected with after getting divorced. Hansa says her marriage is a partnership and believes that her marriage reflects greater trends of gender equality in Thailand, stating:
In the past people were taught that men were the front legs of the elephant and women were the followers. Women were weak … Now, men don’t always have to be leaders or the ‘front legs of the elephant’. Men and women can walk [together]. Women in the past were set to be only a housewife … And now women have more roles than in the past.
Throughout her life and within her marriage, Hansa has both privileged and challenged hegemonic performances of femininities. Hegemonic femininity can be defined as the reproduction of and conformity to ‘the feminine gender role’ (Krane, 2001, p. 18), which consists of the characteristics defined as womanly (Schippers, 2007).