The Strive Towards Genuine Sapphic Representations in Thai Queer Cinema Continues

Based on the current representations existing in the media market from the 2010s to now, many queer feministaudiences, including myself, deem various Thai women-loving-women (WLW) media texts problematic due to itsmaintaining of the normative heterosexual gaze upon queer women. There is an urgent need to investigate thecoherence of these media texts with the realities of queer women. More importantly, whether there exist genuinerepresentations or whether they are still retaining in patriarchy. Furthermore, media texts about queer women in thecontext of Thailand are still less than in terms of production, dissemination, and accurate representation compared tothe West and to its counterpart within the same queer romance genre that is Boy Love (BL) 1 . Thus, it is necessary toexplore the patterns of meanings disseminated through WLW media texts, what they reveal about the perceptionstowards the actual WLW community in Thai context, and how all of these can be tied to the reluctance to grantThailand’s LGBTQ+ community the Equal Marriage Law.