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

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

I'm creating a separate thread post for the pdf of this article and bookmarking its discussion. The pdf is attached, but you can currently find it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2523893#abstract 

 

I beat a Thai performing white masculinity in Thailand s Muay Thai fighting tourism.pdf << 

There have been a fair amount of ethnographic papers on Muay Thai, often organized around an academic or student's lengthy stay in Thailand, training and sometimes fighting, and honestly this it by far the best I've read. It's kind of two papers in one. There is the philosophical framework of the introduction and the conclusion, that is absolute excellent and a bit conceptually ground breaking, and then there is the "field study" which for those of us who have been around Thailand's Muay Thai for a long time may read less interestingly, even if they make up much the substance of the study. The views of traveling fighters compose the mixed-culture subject matter. But this is my personal sense, and is just the manner of this kind of paper and follows with this kind of field work observation. For me the paper really soars when its at its most philosophical.

screen caps like this are great:

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When the author brings together race and gender together with Colonialism it is really driving hard on the right line of inquiry (I would say). An important thing that is missing is that Thailand's Muay Thai is itself a hypermasculinity performance, which you can find in this section of Peter Vail's dissertation, so really what we have is the differential of at least TWO hypermasculinities coming into contact. The author is great at pointing out how emulation is the process of becoming, as well as the process of sought for (racial) domination. A very slippery Colonialist slope indeed. The author's instincts are so strong here I really wish they had teased out their intuited arguments further (maybe there is another paper for this), because this is a much needed discourse in Thailand's tourism Muay Thai, and in fact traditional Muay Thai itself. 

 

But I'm dropping this article here because I hope to return to its framing philosophical picture and perhaps write deeper into it.

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

In the introduction this is just a great set up. It frames so many dyads and polarities that it really captures just how (potentially) transformative the training and fight performance is, litoral to these so many binaries. This idealization of the Thai nakmuay body, which in Thai culture is (generally) socially low, but idealized by Western masculinity (which is socially high - in many registers), is a very complex tension, as often the Western body is seeking its own idealization (the Hard Body). And then that these two bodies come in actual contact, in physical conflict, after a period of where the Thai Body is emulated. This is a very important kernel in sought-for authenticity, at least in traveling fighter tourism.

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

In this mix of conflicting Bodies of race, class and valorized ideals - literal bodies clashing - is the larger context, aside from what may have been the author's experience, that larger bodied Westerners are pitted against lighter bodied Thais (in the purported scale of fairness), and that since COVID under the imperatives of Soft Power a new ruleset style, "Entertainment" Muay Thai, has pervaded, which is designed for the somewhat explicit purpose for the Westerner to win fights. That is, in the balance of emulation that the author outlines, the way that fights are actually being fought and scored has been skewed against the demands of emulation itself, not without Colonialist overtures, especially in topography of the article. This is to say, changing the rules takes some pressure off of promoters and gyms to arrange "dives" to ensure the positive experience of emulative transformation. Now Muay Thai, larger bodied, can be fought in a more Western style, favoring Western skills. At minimum this further contrasts or perhaps complexifies accounts of danced-off 5th rounds, as signatures of authenticity. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is one small passage in Deng's article that really comes forward to me. It cracks open into a possible very powerful critique and analysis of what is occurring. It's this line, in the following context:

"...this imagined Thai masculinity erases Indigenous conception of the man fighting body as a coarse ‘hunting dog’ tethered in communal ties"

 

What stands out is the use of this term, course. The courseness of the Thai body as nak muay as presented by Pattana back in his famous "hunting dog" analogy in the early 2000s. What Deng is drawing forth is that the courseness of the Thai body, which importantly was tethered "in communal ties" (not just tethered, but also constructed by, composed of those ties), is being erased and replaced by an emulative body. This, I would argue, is a transmutation....and significantly, an enormous disruption in the gaze economy which made up the traditional kaimuay. 

Because I am most interested in locating and when possible preserving the form of traditional Muay Thai, I want to talk about it in those terms, and not really in terms of political or rightful judgement (at least at this point). I want to think about how the radical nature of this change points us in both directions, back towards the gaze economies of the traditional kaimuay, that of the "course" body, and towards the coming "emulative" body of the Thai nak muay in Western training contexts...and think how this relates to Muay Thai itself, in the ring, as well as a cultural form of expression.

If we imagine the traditional Thai kaimuay (and, there are so numerous kinds of this we really have to idealize and even fantasize about it to bring this point), the Thai body especially as a youth is never looked at emulatively. In fact as early youth likely most of the work and effort is either unseen, or under control of judgement following the hierarchy of the gym. Thai fighters, especially as youth, but also through out are quite low socially, and the gaze economy would position them as such. 

They also would be judged just physically, in terms of their physiognomy, or their capacity to perform tasks, techniques, endurance. Noticing how young nak muay would often in photos pose in this (seemingly unfighterly) way, he told us: its so you can see their chest. Promoters and others want to see the state of physical development:

above, Karuhat maybe at 16.

We are not far from Pattana's notion of hunting dogs (by which he's attempting to draw a picture of huge social disparity with extreme comparison), or of racing horses, or of any other physical capacity driven contest. Leaving aside Pattana's likely ideological aims, point taken. The gaze to the young fighter in the economy of the kaimuay is largely not emulative. If we look at this clip of 1988 kaimuay shadowboxing and think about the gaze economy - who is looked at and why - we can see we are quite far from the gaze dynamics Deng is locating in traveling fighter gyms (though, what should be lost is that there IS a camera here, I believe the camera of a Westerner, so already we are not really looking at the gaze economy of the kaimuay uninterrupted...they would be shadowboxing different).

 

Thai boys in a kaimuay, but also the maturing fighters are socially quite low, as are even the older padmen and krus, under the hierarchy of the gym, all of them stacked and ordered by a gaze economy. This is what Deng is referring to as the "course" body of the Nak Muay. All of them are de facto "workers", though not "laborers" in the theoretical sense. Workers in the cultural sense of meaning producers within the culture, structured in part by a stacked hierarchical gaze. I would put forth, the economy of this gaze is inseparable from the pedagogy of the nak muay as fighter, and this is especially so because Muay Thai itself is a performance of Thai hypermasculinity. It literally is a performance on a stage, and the development of the Thai nak muay cannot help but be centered on the economy of gaze. Who gets looked at, and why? 

I remember, we were at Lanna which at the time was a fairly "authentic" amalgam of adventure Thai tourism fighting and a real kaimuay. It had a kind of "secret" Thai kaimuay that was inside the gym, Thai fighters raised since kids, traditional training etc. Occasionally another kru outside the gym would come and bring his kid fighter for sparring or such. He became years later, sold to another gym, a powerful military gym, the Bangkok fighter Tanadet. At the time he was just "Poda". Sylvie and I watched with some amazement when his kru just put him on the bag and left, and Poda just went at knees on the bag endlessly. Nobody was looking at him (overtly). This wasn't this gym, he didn't train there. He was just put on the bag. It seemed that unseen by anyone (again, overtly) he would tirelessly go like this on the bag until he was stopped. He would never stop himself. He was very unlike the Thai boys, the fighters of the gym that we had come to know, who were in their own gaze economy (which involved serious Western traveling fighters). There was nothing of the emulative Body in what he was doing. It was the course Body. But, truthfully, it was not that he was unseen in doing this. Both Sylvie and I saw him, and we both will not forget it. His body, and he likely was not aware of it because this was not his space, and we were far on the other side of the gym, went from course Body to emulative Body. And, his example likely influenced Sylvie to train at even higher levels of commitment throughout the years. 

The above is just an anecdote of the tension between kinds of gaze economies in the Thai-Western gym training spaces, something that Deng uncovers in his article. Much can be made of who affluent Westerners are who travel across the globe to come and train and learn from Thais, many of whom could never afford such a trip in their lives, either financially or as an idea. There can be no doubt that the disparity of Western economies entering the low-economies of Muay Thai subclass feeds that economy, but also seriously distorts it, if even as a differential of power, a differential outside of the differentials of power which organize traditional Muay Thai, the wealth and status ladders which make Muay Thai happen, and develop nak muay. This is true. And, I have seen and even talked about how Western traveling fighters bring into Thai training spaces their own cultural habitus, their own conditioned management and performances of affects that are quite alien, and even counter to traditional affect habitus - for instance displays of fatigue, exaggerated signaling of effort, which in the West can be valorized signals of commitment, big sighs, or collapsing to the ground, etc - and that these affect signals can pervade and even overwrite traditional codes in hybrid spaces. This is another sort of incursion. I never really thought about who the very gaze of Western traveling fighters is itself a disruption of the traditional gaze economy of the kaimuay, and then the Thai "gym". The very vital distribution of "who gets looked at, and why" is what conditions the values of training, it is training. When Western eyes enter Thai training spaces, even if nothing is said, even if comportment follows customary values, the very distribution of gaze (and the intent in looking) creates an entirely different kind of "Body" (in the sense that Deng is talking about). And kinds of bodies are very important to Muay Thai, because ruup (posture, form, outline) is a significant scoring factor. The body matters. Bodies are constructed not only by effort and trained capacities, its constructed by gaze. Gaze socially rewards behaviors or comportment. It can also punish the same. And removing gaze can be a powerful feature of shaping capacities.

In some substantive sense, entering the financial economy of a gym and spreading around $100s of dollars is disruptive, but also entering the gaze economy of a gym and spreading around gaze, especially in a restrictive gaze economy in a kaimuay, could be just as disruptive. And, as the number of Western eyes increase in a training space the gaze economy we become further and further skewed towards Western values.

This is where Deng's observation of emulation because very significant. This, culturally, is the transmutation of the course Body into the emulative Body, especially along Western valuation. Who gets looked at, and why? There is an allure of the Thai nak muay Body for the Western traveling fighter not only because the sport is theirs (it is), or even because most of those in a training space have been training and fighting since childhood (many have). It comes also from the affect values that are embodied in Thailand's Muay Thai, the way that it is an achievement of ruup (form) and importantly ease (ning) - as well as values like sanae (charm) and otton (endurance, showing no symptoms). It is especially the cherished quality of ning (being at ease, natural, undisturbed) which is in direct contrast with the Western affect trait of tensing up for both effort and also in the face of duress, which gives the Thai Body of the nak muay an "aura". When training with (and against) Thai nak muay, or even with Thai krus/pad men, there are "how did you do thats?" and "how do you move like thats", but also there can be that "aura" which as Deng points out can be racially, or at least ideologically charged, an exoticization of the Other. The gaze upon this Other is often the gaze of emulation. It transmutes the socially low "course" Thai Body into an emulative one. And...without too much irony Deng points out, Western traveling fighters are not only emulating the Thai Body, they are emulating it to attempt to defeat and dominate it...in the ring, as part of their own transmutation...an effort which certainly would yield to some Colonialist criticism. 

The power of the gaze as such is worth considering, especially as it featured in the kaimuay gaze economy. It is quite common to attribute the great grace and performative capacities of Thai fighters to how young they started training and fighting in the sport. There is a sense in which all that experience is already baked-in and become second nature by the time they reached Bangkok rings in the past. And we can regard this as true. But, I would offer with a focus on the gaze economy in the role of pedagogy, and the development of the very identities of fighters that it may be even less how young they started fighting (Karuhat, for instance started at 15, comparatively late), so much as how they have been shaped by the gaze economies of their culture and sub-cultures, the who and whys of getting looked at, and importantly, that by the time nak muay are becoming rising stars in the rings of Bangkok (at least in the Golden Age of the sport) they are passing through adolescence into young adulthood, exactly when gaze can matter most in identity formation. Because Thai nak muay were suddenly gaining cosmopolitan gaze attention, they also were hitting 16, 17, 18, notably after a rather restricted gaze economy of the kaimuay, and the gazes of local festival fighting. It is likely that the sequestering of gaze played a vital, formative role in the sudden bursting on the scenes of Bangkok, Thai fighters dramatically displaying hypermasculine performances under duress, in the aesthetics of the sport, as an expression of identity itself. 

It is enough to say, these economies of gaze are changed in our day, and in mixed cultural training circumstances with Westerners, radically changed. Different things get you looked at. A 14-15 year old Thai boy sparring a Westerner in a training ring while 3 Westerners look on at the rope is just a very different set of gaze criteria today than if sparring a gym mate in a corner of the gym rather unseen in 1988. (As just a sidenote: I have seen Thai fighters who have trained around Westerners, even in fairly traditional contexts, fight with a sort of early fight peacocking that seems new to the sport, a peacocking that could not be backed up, perhaps a product of the new gaze training economies.) This is also to leave out a completely separate and quite different gaze economy of the nak muay which certainly did not exist 35 years ago, the gaze economy of social media, being looked at through video and photographs by numerous, faceless others. Training kaimuay of the past were very cloistered environment, not only in terms of outside influence, but in terms of highly restrictive gaze dynamics. Now Thai nak muay gaze economies are spread throughout the world in social media channels, not only to Thais, but to Westerners and everyone else. It likely is unmeasurable how much of a change this has brought to the culture, let alone Muay Thai and the development of the fighter as hypermasculine performer. 

Deng brings in the very significant factor of the Western traveling gaze in the tourist gym, in tourist centers like Phuket or Chiangmai. Socially low Thai bodies of nak muay and ex-fighters are being looked at with emulation by social high (affluent) Westerners. Among the higher, cosmopolitan classes of first Siam, and then Thailand have held the Western gaze with great esteem (even if problematized, or mixed esteem). It should not be overlooked at that in these training spaces lower status Thais are receiving the emulative gaze of the Westerner. This cannot help but be a status transmutation, in even a historic sense, if even in part, of no small order. And the kinds of valorizations that occur at the level of gaze and imitation are of a very different value economy of those that traditionally produced Muay Thai (even if the things valued, like ning, or balance, or sanae are the same). Their production is different. And, there is the power differential that these are larger bodied, economically affluent (often) men who are looking through emulation to defeat and dominate the Thai Body in the ring. The cross-signs of power, especially at the ideological level, are contradictory and complex.

Deng also eludes to but does not state outright that in adventure fight tourism there is another alluring Thai Body in tourist destinations, that of the bar girl and prostitute. In a strange pair, there is a male and female counterpart (leaving aside trans-gender, and queerness for a moment) both forming a Thai Body Other, often both partaken from by Western fight tourism. The homosocial fighter and the emulative nak muay, and the alluring, receptive Thai bar girl. I do not have another perspective on this because I know these mostly just through stereotypes because I haven't spent time in these kinds of more tourism-oriented training spaces or around bar culture, but it cannot be without comparison at least in terms of critique. 

What is interesting is that if the Thai kaimuay gaze economies are radically and utterly undermined - I remember filming at a Bangkok kaimuay that still is almost entirely Thai and regularly provides fighters for all the stadium shows, and we asked if they are interested in Westerners training there, and at first they said "no", and then a short time later came back and said "They can, but if they train here they can never leave", meaning, you are on lockdown at the camp, you don't leave its walls, the gaze economy is in tact - and certainly they are undermined if only at the level of social media, what is to become of the Thai nak muay and the magical fighter camps would produce? Long now have we said this fighter no longer exists, Saenchai being the last of them. We see them in videos, and we have documented them as a generation or two, in the Muay Thai Library project. Could it be that the training capacities are falling not only because the talent pool is diminishing, or that the small kaimuay is being lost to Thailand, or that the camera and video have changed what is wanted from a fighter, but also that the gaze economy of instruction and development has been broken open. Who is looked at, and what for?

I was wrong, or at least incomplete to say that in the kaimuay the lower-status nak muay did not have a emulative body. I delayed this because I didn't want to complexify the contrast too much in the above. Indeed there is an emulative body of the nak muay that develops in the very maturation within the kaimuay, as younger boys become stronger, more accomplished fighters, and start receiving more of the gaze economy. Older fighters, even by one year, just as in any school or family, are emulative to the younger, but as Deng points out, this emulation is quite personal. It is tied to the "community", in really in a much smaller community than that, the family of the kaimuay. Status is increased with age, and younger fighters emulate older fighters in their own small gym. This is one of the destructive elements of big Bangkok gyms when they take fighters of any success from smaller kaimuay. They are removing the emulative body from the de facto "family" of the gym, the practice and identity which draws the lower status fighters up. This emulation and status change though happens within closed, traditional gaze economy of the kaimuay. It develops. It is quite different than the allure of the Thai Body nak muay or trainers may be assigned by a Western traveling fighter. The distribution of the gaze and the values of that distribution are radically different and altering.

 

 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

There is an entirely separate dimension of gaze economy in mixed-culture gyms that I'd love to write about, but bookmarking here so to maybe pick it up another day, and that is the way in which visiting Westerners enter training spaces and do not even look so much at Thais in the space, for orientation (despite all that I wrote so far above on this), and really look horizontally at other, longer term farang in spaces. Writing even from our first experiences in Thailand, in mixed-culture gym spaces, visiting Thailand even in the most touristed areas can be a very intense experience of foreign-ness, and entering a Muay Thai gym, even the most commercial of these spaces (which are themselves quite scocially agonistic and competitive) can be an emotional experience without compass. One enters these spaces looking for "how to do it", and immediately one takes social cues from all the other Western traveling fighters. The at-first imitative, and oriented gaze is towards longer term Westerners who "know the ropes", eventually will become emulative, because part of training in Thailand is learning how to be a traveling fighter, involving many things other than simply the training. Everything from where and when to drink water, to where eat, to how to comport oneself, the sum total of "how to go about things" largely learned through imitating longer term traveling fighters. We remember - and this is just a small thing - that Sylvie at Lanna so many years ago (Lanna being one of the more established "authentic" mix-culture gyms in Thailand, with a lengthy history), had to mentally separate herself out from the 40 minute hand-wrapping beginning of training that had grown among Western traveling fighters, to begin every morning's training, where you not only wrap hands, quite slowly, coming back from your run (for those that ran, most did a pretty substantial run), but really just talking, shooting the breeze, or just being a part of that mini-habitus of training preparation, sitting on the bench with others, even if you kept by yourself. This was a sub-culture of "how to begin training" that had developed around longer term fighters, really a small thing, but it was its own reality, its own pace, an important part of the traveling culture of the gym at the time, quite apart from the Thai-led training. It was emulative.

Our time at Lanna then, but also at several other gyms, made us quite aware of how gyms actually were in laminate layers of habitus, a Thai and non-Thai side, and that long term fighters, or adventure tourists played a very large part in creating and bearing the Western sub-culture, in part because it was constantly fed by new, fairly disoriented participants. 

******

We are left with a mirroring hypermasculinity, between two cultures / sub-cultures. The Westerner engages in a Hard Body hypermasculinity, and probably a (pomo) Colonialist adventurist hypermasculinity, and the Thai Nak Muay is participating in a hypermasculinity which somewhat resides in his (her) past, that out of which the art and sport of Muay Thai has grown (Peter Vail cited above). The Nak Muay is encountering the project of developing and expressing the (somewhat classic, somewhat nostalgic) hypermasculinity of his (her) own culture, but also caught in the globalized commerce, the subjectivity of Internationalization, which brings these two cultures / sub-cultures together. The newly arrived traveling fighter from the West is thrown in between these two performances in really what can be a heady, transformative way, emulating well-grounded Westerners, weaving himself (herself) into that fabric, fashioning that hypermasculine identity and performance, that gaze economy, while that masculinity itself has been in the longer term developed in emulative fashion on the Thai Body, at least in terms of the transformation being attempted, to lean into Thai, classic hypermasculinity. In this several things map between the two hypermasculinities, but really many more do not. All this while, Thai Nak Muay in these spaces are also being swept up toward a new, globalized masculine, following the new gaze economies the body is exposed to, including those digital economies of gaze.