“Darling, Beauty is Pain”

Abstract

How has postfeminist media culture traveled transnationally? What contributes to the postfeminist media’s popularity in Thailand? This paper performs a content analysis of YouTube’s reality show, This is Me Vatanika. The show features gender issues and the promotion of gender equality, enhances women’s empowerment, encourages women’s leadership and rhetorically calls upon its viewers to partake in the process of self-invention. I draw upon postfeminist media culture and its sensibilities and argue that this reality show inspires a new modality of femininity endemic in Thai society and that it interpolates neoliberal women in line with the logic of wealth and class, all of which impact upon female bodies. I contend that postfeminist media is increasingly evident in Thai society and the audiences’ identification with and responses to the show underscore the structural gender arrangements within the society that can pose a hindrance to fully inventing oneself in the neoliberal culture.