‘I beat a Thai’: performing white masculinity in Thailand’s Muay Thai fighting tourism

The rise of Muay Thai combines recent revivals of the traditional man body with the search for Oriental authenticity. This study draws on a year of ethnography as an Asian boxer to analyse the intersection of race and masculinity in Muay Thai fighting travels, an activity where global travellers, mostly white men, fought Muay Thai in Thailand, often against Thai opponents. It focuses on travellers’ bodily performances of fear, pain and joy in the Thai ring. These are shaped by competing discourses of masculinity circulating at various scales, as well as an ambiguous reading of Thai men’s bodies as at once exalted and disputed. Rather than being a signal of progressive manhood, sensual lives within hard masculinity weave men’s bodies with racial discourses, giving rise to new colonial territories and places of entitlements.