Thailand’s Burmese shadow: Queer Buddhist melancholia and the supernatural in The Only Mom (Chartchai Ketnust, 2019)

Contemporary cinema from Southeast Asia is often marked by a particular attunement to the realm of the supernatural. These elements are not confined to horror films, nor is their presence necessarily geared towards the affective responses typically produced by this genre. In the postcolonial context, the indigenous folklore underlying such films may shore up notions of a shared national identity while highlighting the imposition of Western epistemologies and traditions, both historically and in the form of globalized neoliberal capitalism. LGBT activism, whilst bringing issues of gender and sexuality to the fore in Southeast Asia in recent decades, also sits uneasily alongside the history of imperialism and white supremacy. This paper considers how tensions between rights-based discourses and local concepts of gender and sexuality play out onscreen, notably regarding Myanmar's "democratic decade" (2011—2021).

Focusing the depiction of the Burmese supernatural in the 2019 Thai-Burmese horror film, “The Only Mom", this paper posits the figure of the spirit medium (Nat Kadaw in Burmese, Rang song/Khon song in Thai) as a nexus of tensions between competing discourses around gender and sexuality in Southeast Asia. The trope of Burmeseness itself also arguably functions as an important site of liminality for Thai modernity. This paper draws from scholarship on Southeast Asian cinema, especially psychoanalytically informed accounts of gender, sexuality and the spectral, to understand "The Only Mom" as a case study of contemporary anxieties around globalisation, demonstrating how a queerness elided from national narratives and unrepresented within globalised LGBT activism "haunts" Southeast Asian modernity.