TOMBOIGATOEYMANGO
TOMBOIGATOEYMANGO (2010)
Boiling water and painting my nails at Subterranean Arthouse. Footage by Mark McBeth.
I wanted to make a performance piece about “authenticity,” specifically to complicate the question of whether or not I can make “authentic” claims to either Thainess or whiteness, masculinity or femininity, maleness or femaleness in their “pure,” “original” forms, as a trans/genderqueer person of mixed race continually in the process of reclaiming and embodying these identities. Since my body “queers” the borders of race and gender, the identities I inhabit often feel like destinations to which I can never fully arrive or belong, so I often feel like a tourist to my own transitions and transformations. Like a tourist, I have had to learn about and maintain a connection to myself through Thai restaurants, guidebooks, language tapes, the colonizer’s authorial gaze and YouTube. I wanted to create the setting of a travel agency within which to reenact these “authentic” claims and performances of identity as a kind of identity tourism, by watching myself and mimicking multiple forms of media.
I also wanted to think about “authenticity” in terms of the country, and how colonizers and tourists fetishize the simplicity of village life as being symbolic of a culture, and a euphoric “return” to that scene, which actually no longer exists in such a “pure,” uncolonized state and is often manufactured specifically for tourist consumption. These scenes are also embedded with images of “pure” femininity and femaleness, which become part of how Thailand essentializes Thainess by constructing a national Thai identity as a package tour. I use the music of Dutch singer Christy Gibson, who is praised for her performances of luk tung and mor lam, Thai and Thai/Lao music from the more rural northeastern provinces, to think about this question of mastery with regards to language and culture.
What was discussed in the feedback session centered around exclusion, distance, layering and presence, restlessness and transport, and what it means to watch me (in real time) watch myself perform (in the past).
Credits for media used (in order of appearance):
1) Video: Titles for the lakorn Luk Sao Gamnan
2) Sound: Educational Services Teaching Cassettes, Language/30, Thai
3) Video: TOMBOIGATOEYMANGO Episode 3 (draft) – Jai Arun Ravine
4) Sound: Huk Tae Sao Eesaan – Christy Gibson
5) Spoken Text: Se-ed’s Modern Thai-English Dictionary, Mini Edition
6) Spoken Text: Cities of the World: Bangkok – James Kirkup, 1968
7) Video: TOMBOIGATOEYMANGO Episode 2 – Jai Arun Ravine
8) Video: Siam Mueang Yim – Christy Gibson
9) Sound: Loop that samples a track from Thailand: Lao Music of the Northeast – lucy e parsonz
* This piece was presented at a work-in-progress showing as part of the Subterranean Performance Investigation Salon #1 at Subterranean Arthouse in Berkeley on September 19, 2010. Video documentation courtesy Mark McBeth.
TOMBOI GATOEY MANGO (Episode 2) (2010) (4 min. 48 sec.)
I opened a travel agency so I could teleport back to an imagined gurlhood, a lost destination where I could perform a like gay likay, a corny lakorn to morn an illegible phaghood and paint my fingernails. This is a VDO brochure for Episode 2 of the ongoing drama TOMBOIGATOEYMANGO. Some costume elements by Iraya Robles. Music by Fong Naam, “Chin” Chinawut Indracusin and K-OTIC.
Screenings: My People Film Series Shorts Program presented by the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, PA, November 8, 2011
TOMBOI GATOEY MANGO Episode 1 (2010) (3 min. 02 sec.)
This video is about the way my mother peels mangoes and the meanings of กะเทย/”gatoey.” I read a definition of กะเทย/”gatoey” (more commonly transliterated as “kathoey”) from Se-Ed’s Modern Thai-English Dictionary, and a passage from Toms and Dees: Transgender Identity and Female Same-Sex Relationships in Thailand by Megan J. Sinnott. I use part of “Sao Dok Kum Tai,” a track from Thai Pop Spectacular: 1960s-1980s.
Screenings: My People Film Series Shorts Program presented by the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in Pittsburgh, PA, November 8, 2011
