Listening for Queer: The Intermedial Circuits of a Raw Aesthetics in Bangkok's Nightlife

Abstract: This article traces multiple instantiations of the "queer" as it manifests intermedially across the registers of discourse, image, sound and affect in Bangkok. Shifting in gradation between representational and materialist frameworks, I examine a range of media objects including a tourism campaign, circuit party, underground aesthetics and painful affect to show how "queer" constitutes not only the identifiable forms of subject formation but also the speculative possibilities of subjectlessness. Giving particular attention to Non Non Non, Thailand's first "underground queer rave collective", I offer the queer rave's negative affects of pain as a possible mode of critique aimed at the forms of pleasure that undergird Bangkok's queer nightlife scene and its formalization of a differentially accessed queer subjectivity.