Transgenderism and Northern Thai Spirit Mediumship
Andrew Matzner
The religious beliefs of the northern Thai people consist of a mixture of Hindu Brahmanism, Buddhism (Thailand's "official" faith), and animism, a system of indigenous spirituality. Spirits play a very important role in the everyday life of many northerners, both rural and urban. One aspect of animism which has been widely written about by researchers is that of local spirit cults. These cults typically consist of female members, and many are based on matrilineal descent groups. Anthropologist Gehan Wijeyewardene writes, "The domestic cults are basically concerned with women and with women's affairs, with the chastity of women, the purity of the house and domestic tranquillity"(1986: 146). Members regularly perform rituals such as the offering of food or incense to various household and ancestor spirits. Cult groups also have mediums. These are people, usually women, whose bodies have been chosen by spirits to be their human hosts. The ritual possession of mediums is one of the central features of the spirit cults.
According to Wijeyewardene, although mediums are usually women, a small number are kathoey. "It is often said by Chiang Mai people that male mediums are either transvestites or homosexuals or both - the Thai word may be used in both senses" (159). Walter Irvine, who is also an anthropologist, explains the ability of kathoey to become mediums by citing the northern Thai belief regarding gender differences between men and women. Men are believed to possess "strong" souls, and are psychically characterized as strongly bounded entities who are able to easily defend themselves from penetration by outside supernatural agents. On the other hand, women are said to be "weak-souled". This means their personal boundaries are less able to resist penetration by external supernatural elements. Accordingly, when spirits (known as chao) are looking for a body to possess, they will seek one with a weak-soul, since that allows easier access than does a hard-souled body (Irvine, 1982: 138). Because kathoey are also generally believed to be "weak-souled", they too are just as susceptible to being possessed as women are (225).
For a part of his study of northern Thai spirituality, supernatural belief and 'madness', Irvine collected information from 52 spirit mediums who live in and around Chiang Mai. Of the 18 males included in his survey, 14 were classified by Irvine as "homosexual" (354). However, Irvine notes that his numbers are biased to the extent that the actual proportion of male to female mediums is less than his numbers suggest. That is, males probably make up 15% of approximately 300 total mediums (353). Nevertheless, Irvine believes that his numbers are large enough to provide a basis for generalization (ibid.).
One of the areas Irvine explores is the northern Thai belief that some people become sick due to the power of a particular spirit (chao). Persons who are so afflicted have two choices: either to give into the chao, become a spirit medium and thus regain their health, or to refuse to do so, and thereby continue in their state of sickness. Based on survey data which showed that a majority of male mediums took the step of entering into spirit mediumship only after they had first been afflicted with a physical illness, Irvine suggests that there is a "psychosomatic process" at work which can explain the relationship between being a kathoey and being a medium (355). Commenting on the personal histories of the informants in his survey, he writes that the bodily symptoms suffered by men prior to becoming mediums, such as stomach pains and skin problems,
were somatic manifestations of the mental conflict and emotional tension that arose in the process of managing their homosexual orientations and in that of enacting the well-accepted but derided 'homosexual-transvestite' (NT kathooi) role. . .I wish to suggest that among males, spirit mediumship functions primarily as a framework for withdrawing from the prevailing half-jocular, half-derisive social responses to the kathooi role, and for resolving the mental, emotional or bodily consequences of those responses. We might specify that resolution of conditions seem to hinge mainly of the fact that as spirit mediums, men can act in ways which violate prevailing rules about appropriate male behavior without stigma and have access to ideas which can be used to justify the tendency to direct their sexuality to members of their own sex. (355)
That is, Irvine argues that kathoey who suffer from social non-acceptance can mitigate their "stigma" by becoming possessed by chao which then force them to become spirit mediums. Having entered into the role of medium, kathoey now have the freedom to adopt the feminine role (i.e. clothing and behavior) which is demanded in their channeling of powerful, penetrative chao. In addition, as the host of a powerful spirit, a kathoey is in the position to earn respect from clients and other mediums (477).
Irvine briefly considers kathoey in contexts other than mediumship, such as participants in beauty contests and fashion shows held in village monasteries, members of traveling likay theater troupes, and market sellers (477). I reproduce below in full what Irvine has written on this last topic, because, although it is not much, we still possess so little concrete information about how kathoey have made their livings in the rural areas. Because it is buried in the appendix of his Ph.D. dissertation, I would like to take this opportunity to share it with a wider audience.
. . .[K]athooi may be seen as successful salesmen at village or town markets where women dominate and where men are present as casual buyers. In one case, a self-made entrepreneur of poor, unlanded, peasant origin, was said to owe his prosperity to the kathooi salesmen whom he employed to distribute and sell his stock of cosmetics. The man operated in several towns of Northern, North Eastern and Central Thailand, carrying his merchandise and his eight kathooi in the back of his van, with his wife sitting by him in the front. At each town, he would stay for several days, sending off the kathooi to the market by five in the morning with large cardboard boxes of goods. This businessman had tried to employ females as saleswomen without success, and was only able to make his sales shoot up when he decided to employ kathooi instead. He reported that their success was partly related to their hard work, but also to their entertainment value, for dressed up and made up as women, the young kathooi looked, he said, better than most women, thus providing unbeatable advertisements for his products, while attracting clients by the very fact of being kathooi, and their ability to ape the dabble of women, and entertain. However, when off the job, and although enjoying their work and success, individual members of this group of salesmen spoke of the stigma attached to the kathooi role. Some put particular stress on the subordinate and derided identity which was given to them in their own villages and even in their families, this attitude explaining the fact that many called at their villages as seldom as possible, perhaps only at New Years, when they honor their parents by performing the dam huua ritual. It can be concluded that these men, who were excluded except as clown-like figures from their village communities, had found an alternative grouping with others like themselves. Within the bounds of this grouping, stigma could be kept at bay, and outside it could also be transformed by means of their acting skills into the basis for a kind of success. (476)
Although it is not entirely clear how exactly Irvine came by this information, it is nevertheless valuable because it gives at least some idea of employment options open to kathoey in rural Thailand. It also points to the ambiguity in issues of acceptance, as these kathoey, who face discrimination by their families and local village communities, also are to some degree accepted as sellers in the marketplace.
One limitation of Irvine's analysis is that his interpretation of the "kathoey role" is fully informed by the social interactionist theory of stigma management:
Playing into the 'deference blackmail', whereby a stigmatized subject's statements and behavior are responded to only if he plays the demeaning role appropriate to his particular deviance, a kathooi performs what Garfinkle [1967] calls 'a degradation of self for the congenial smiles of significant others' and becomes performer of the female role, obtaining amused, derisive approval. (476)
Although this is a thought-provoking hypothesis, Irvine does not present research data to support his argument. Therefore, it is not clear whether or not he interviewed kathoey about their motives or non-kathoey about their attitudes towards kathoey.
Kathoey spirit mediums are also discussed by Rosalind Morris in her academic article, "The Empress's New Clothes: Dressing and Redressing Modernity in Northern Thai Spirit Mediumship" (1994). She relates that most of the mediums for the powerful female spirit of Queen Chamathewi are men, the majority of whom are kathoey. This queen was the Mon leader of the Haripunchai kingdom, which extended throughout what is today the northern Thai province of Lamphun. She is especially well-known because of the manner in which she defeated her suitor Vilangkha, the king of the Lawa.
According to the legend, after Vilangkha asked for her hand, Chamathewi - who had no desire to marry the king - told him that she would acquiesce to marriage if, on three tries, he would be able to throw his spear from the mountain Doi Suthep into the Lamphun city walls (approximately 30 km. distance). Vilangkha accepted the challenge, and with his first throw made his spear almost reach the city walls. Chamathewi, afraid that the king would accomplish what she had thought was an impossible feat, devises a plan to destroy his strength. Taking fabric from her undergarments, the queen made it into a hat, and sent it to the king as a present. Vilangkha, pleased by what he believes is the queen's admiration, places the hat on his head, and makes his second throw. However, this time the spear falls far short of the mark. On the third try, the spear is caught up by the wind, and spun back in reverse, piercing the king and killing him. The king's loss of strength is due to the fact that the hat had been made from "polluted" fabric, in that it had been in contact with the queen's menstrual blood. This illustrates the northern Thai belief that male potency will be destroyed by the polluted, and thereby dangerously impure nature of this female bodily fluid. By placing the hat made from the queen's undergarments on his head, the body's most spiritually sensitive and potent area, the king assured that the seat of his strength would be undermined (Irvine, 1984: 260).
Queen Chamathewi is a very popular spirit for mediums, and she visits more than twenty mediums in the Chiang Mai area, most of whom, as mentioned above, are kathoey. Morris explores the relationship between Chamathewi's mediums and the clothing (of the style in which the queen would have dressed) they wear during possession. For the males, the queen's undergarments are threatening due to their (destructive) power. By wearing such powerfully charged articles of clothing, her kathoey mediums - who are still biologically male - risk being negatively affected by the clothing's power (Morris, 60).
The information about kathoey found in Irvine and Morris is important because it locates transgenderism in a context other than that in which it is most typically placed by western writers and travelers: sex work. This connection between spirituality and kathoey is well worth investigating further, and certainly the work of Irvine and Morris provide good starting points for future research.
References
Irvine, Walter. "The Thai-Yuan 'Madman,' and the Modernizing, Developing Thai Nation as Bounded Entities Under Threat: A Study in the Replication of a Single Image." Ph.D. Dissertation, University of London, 1982.
Morris, Rosalind. "The Empress's New Clothes: Dressing and Redressing Modernity in Northern Thai Spirit Mediumship," in The Transformative Power of Cloth in Southeast Asia, Lynne Milgram and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Toronto: The Museum for Textiles and the Canadian Council for Southeast Asian Studies, 1994, 53-74.
Wijeyewardene, Gehan. Place and Emotion in Northern Thai Ritual Behaviour. Bangkok: Pandora, 1986.