Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

Dr. Brett FARMER                                                              (Chulalongkorn University)   
email: <brett.f@chula.ac.th>

"Battling Angels and Golden Orange Blossoms: Thai Television and/as the Popular Public Sphere"

From its advent in 1955 when the first Thai TV network was established under the authoritarian prime ministership of Field Marshal Phibun Songkhram, Thai television has been subject to rigorous state governance. Despite recent moves toward liberalisation, all free-to-air TV networks in Thailand remain under the ownership of the Royal Thai Government, and even networks licensed to private commercial operators are subject to close state supervision and have been prone to allegations of politico-corporate collusion. The restrictive political economy of Thai television has engendered widespread critiques with commentators routinely singling out the dearth of independent news programming and current affairs commentary and the contrastive surfeit of escapist entertainment in the form of soap operas, game shows, musical varieties and other such populist fare as a sign of the medium's debased civic cast. This chapter seeks to provide a more complicated imaging of Thai television and its role in national civic life. In particular, it explores how popular entertainment genres, far from necessarily signalling a retreat from the public sphere, function to articulate and process a host of issues, big and small, local, national and global that impact the life circumstances of Thai TV’s diverse audiences. The paper develops a case study of Thai lakorn or soap opera, an enduringly popular staple of Thai TV that has been routinely dismissed by social elites as lowbrow sensationalism (nam nao) but that holds enormous appeal for large sectors of the Thai viewing public. While undoubtedly containing reactionary dynamics, these programs obtain a deeply complex social discursivity and, as evidenced by a string of recent high profile controversies, explore a variety of pressing cultural political issues that can fuel intense public debate.