The Signifying Tomboy and the Thai TV Series Club Friday To Be Continued: She Changed

Abstract

This article examines the representation of same-sex attracted women in contemporary Thai culture by using the television series Club Friday To Be Continued: She Changed (2016) as the prime example. The show’s portrayal of the tomboy protagonist is not uncontroversial, given that her unfolding love for a man betrays the tomboy’s original self-identity as a woman-loving woman. It invokes the heteronormative specter that sees female homoeroticism as temporary or situational while same-sex attracted women will turn “straight” so long as they meet the right men. This article, however, urges us to look beyond the seeming political incorrectness and focus on the changing signification of “tomboy” in the Thai culture. I argue that the series dramatizes the expanded meaning of tomboy: now detached from a firm association with female homoeroticism (tom) to become a form of women’s gendered self-fashioning (tomboyism) that is mediated by trendy intra-Asian cosmopolitanism in contemporary Thai society.