As a way of opening space for themselves in a religious world that otherwise refuses to recognize them, queer and trans Thai Buddhist artists in Bangkok have developed an array of innovative aesthetic practices to re-work key Buddhist philosophies, materialities, and rituals and expand the Buddhist path. Queer and trans Thai people have generally appeared in scholarship as victims of religious prohibitions and exclusions. But I approach them instead as agents who actively re-shape Thai Buddhist practices and beliefs. Through their art-making, they at once re-define and strengthen their connections to Thai Buddhism as they assert the reality of queer and trans people in a culture that prefers them to be invisible. By working with Buddhist materials—ritual flowers, live fish, monastic robes, and so on—these artists create new relationships with their own bodies, the natural world, and the Buddhist teachings, forging what I call “Buddhist material intimacies.” The result is a profound revisioning of Buddhist ethics for themselves and on behalf of other queer and trans Thai people.
A queer floral artist named Naraphat challenges the role of merit-making practices in Thai Buddhism. Merit-making refers to the actions Buddhists take to improve their karma so that they can be re-born in a better life. While Thai Buddhists offer flowers to temples to gain merit, Naraphat explains that these flowers are often grown under unethical conditions. To sustain the flower economy, growers must manipulate the lives of flowers with insecticides and artificial light that accelerates their growth, in this way violating the Buddhist teaching of impermanence that all phenomena are empty and transient. Naraphat explores this dynamic in his piece called “The Cage” (2019), which establishes a dichotomy between flowers blossoming freely, on the one hand, and imprisoned, on the other.
Two refrigerators contain various species of perfectly manicured fresh-cut flowers. The flowers stand upright and uniform with a beaming light shining in on them, ready to be sold to customers. In contrast, outside this refrigerated space are flowers that are developing naturally on the beds of the earth. While some flowers stand naturally upright, others like lilies fall slightly to the side as they bloom. In this outside world, unburdened by the constraints of capitalism and the flower economy, flowers grow and develop freely. Like the flowers outside the refrigerator, Naraphat yearns for the freedom to bloom as he is, while as a queer person he had existed inside the cold and enclosed space of normative prohibitions against him. The contrast developed in the piece recalls the time when he was a young queer person bullied and pressured by peers to disclose his gender identity.
“This piece,” he writes of “The Cage,” “signifies society’s attempts to suppress the expression of diverse sexual and gender identities…we should respect people’s right to grow and bloom naturally and in their own determination.” For Naraphat, flowers exist within their own life-worlds and are deserving of freedom and justice. Here, the life of flowers is inseparable from his own life as a queer Buddhist. Naraphat’s work helps to expand ethical considerations of Buddhist materiality by illustrating how flowers do not exist solely for the purpose of merit-making, but instead are situated within larger networks and relationships— economical, ecological, and religious. In this way, Naraphat invites Thai people to cultivate a Buddhist ethics that recognizes and respects the interconnected life-threads of being.
Foundational to my research method is examining the process of art-making itself, including how artists literally work with materials and move their bodies as they are making art. Tracing these artists’ movements, I see how they offer an approach to Buddhist materials that radically differs from the highly fast-paced commercialized world of Bangkok’s famous Buddhist flower-making and shrine spaces where craftsmen routinely dispose of flowers that are broken and browned and thus not perfectly suitable for ritual offerings. Queer and trans artists tend to value such broken materials, as they find in them a reflection of their own journeys with self-acceptance. One artist, for example, offered a dying lotus when making merit at a temple. I also have conversations with artists about their memories, their engagements with Buddhism, experiences of gender, and aesthetic choices (why these materials and not others).
I situate the work of queer and trans Thai Buddhist artists within a broader context of oppression toward queer and trans people in contemporary Thai Buddhist society. Queer and trans people in Thailand often believe that they are born as queer or trans because they committed ethical misconduct in their past life (de Lind van Wijngaarden and Fongkaew 2020), which makes being queer or trans a form of karmic punishment. Many Thai trans women are not accepted by their families for being trans (Ojanen et. al 2018) and believe that their bad karma is the primary reason that they are trans (Winter 2006). Moreover, since the early 2000s, lay people have expressed anger about queer monastics, taking photos of effeminate monks to shame them for their feminine comportments, then posting these images online with the result that these monks must leave the monastery (Schedneck 2021). Schedneck (2021) terms this phenomenon the “lay Buddhist gaze,” revealing the oppressive and restrictive treatment of queer monks in Thailand.
What is missing from this now decades-long scholarship is how queer and trans Buddhists themselves live with and against Buddhist norms and doctrines while at the same time viewing themselves as good and devout Buddhists. Queer and trans Buddhists have appeared only as the prohibited others in this scholarship, whereas I resituate them as agents who practice a doctrinally capacious and inclusive Buddhism with broad implications for Buddhism itself and for Buddhist Studies.
Ultimately, this presentation will be of interest to scholars of contemporary Buddhism, queer and trans religion, material culture, art, and ecology as I outline how artists advance embodied and material re-conceptions of fundamental Buddhist doctrines and practices, including karma, merit-making, and impermanence. By re-purposing and instantiating intimate relationships with Buddhist materials, the artists I study open pathways that affirm their existences as queer and trans people.
As a way of opening space for themselves in a religious world that otherwise refuses to recognize them, queer and trans Thai Buddhist artists in Bangkok have developed an array of innovative aesthetic practices to re-work key Buddhist philosophies, materialities, and rituals and expand the Buddhist path. Queer and trans Thai people have generally appeared in scholarship as victims of religious prohibitions and exclusions. But I approach them instead as agents who actively re-shape Thai Buddhist practices and beliefs. Through their art-making, they at once re-define and strengthen their connections to Thai Buddhism. By working with Buddhist materials—ritual flowers, live fish, monastic robes, rope, and so on—these artists create new relationships with their own bodies, the natural world, and the Buddhist teachings, forging what I call “Buddhist material intimacies.” The result is a profound revisioning of Buddhist ethics for themselves and on behalf of other queer and trans Thai people.