Lilit Worawutsunthorn. Queering the school: transformative space and shifting gender powers among Thai secondary school students. Doctoral Degree(Sociology and Anthropology). Chiang Mai University. Library. : Chiang Mai University, 2025.
Queering the school: transformative space and shifting gender powers among Thai secondary school students
Abstract:
This dissertation aims to study the heteronormative cultivation that had been performed through school practices and mechanisms. It also seeks to investigate the negotiation against heteronormativity performed by the students. By applying different views on the space-related theory, this study questions if the gender powers embedded within the school space where conservatism and heteronormativity had been dominated can be transformed into queer-friendly space. With the hint of the occurrence of the political turmoil of 2020, which affected the perception on gender equality and rights among students, a year-long school-based ethnography has been conducted alongside online-based ethnography, in-depth interviews and focus groups. Although the political movements ceased about two years ago, the results showed that gender practices had been tied to field-implicit macro-politics. The agents within the school, including conservative senior teachers and officials with school authority, junior teachers who were queer-friendly and pursued bureaucratic changes, and students who were positioned at the bottom of the school hierarchy, engaged in different practices to reinforce or challenge heteronormativity. The key to challenge heteronormativity within the school space is the alteration of agents lasting habitus, which occurred through different engagement with the school authority. Students acknowledged and engaged in different practices, varying with the prevailing spatialities at that time in three forms: 1) conforming to the authority, 2) evading the authority, and 3) resisting the authority. The conforming and evading engagement has been observed and found in school-based practices within the authority-dominated spatialities, while the resisting engagement has been found online, where their gender expressions were fully in their control as the students were the creators of their own spatialities. With multi-platform uses, online spaces offered students queer-scalable sociality where trust and collective experiences served as tokens to access each layer of gender expression display. Moreover, online sociality can be extended into intimated groups school daily practices. This sheds light on the emergence of new categories of Queer Transformative Spaces: 1) homosocial online spaces and 2) everyday practices of the intimated groups.