Arnika Fuhrmann, the author of Ghostly Desires: Queer Sexuality and Vernacular Buddhism in Contemporary Thai Cinema, is concerned with “the social positionality of minoritized persons” (p. 17) and writes against a Buddhist-inspired pathologization of minoritarian sexuality, desire, and queer personhood in contemporary Thailand. This pathologization is rooted in a general devaluation of sexuality and desire in Theravada Buddhism that Fuhrmann labels as “Buddhist-informed negativity” (p. 2). Since “Thai modernity was never conceptualized solely as a secular modernity but always remained also a Buddhist modernity” (p. 5), Buddhist-informed negativity becomes the cultural background for a commonsensical understanding “of homosexuality and transgender positions as diminished personhood [that] evokes vernacular notions of karmically determined inferiority (p. 139)” in contemporary Thailand.

This brilliant book has much to contribute to our understanding of Thailand's contemporary sociocultural configuration beyond the confines of critical film theory and queer advocacy. Fuhrmann's transdisciplinary approach is a perfect example of what the queering of area studies can look like and thus fits well with the idea of New Area Studies research and its goal to investigate situated differences and formulate mid-range concepts.

The book consists of an introduction, four thematic chapters, and a coda. While the introduction is largely theoretical, the four thematic chapters and the coda are organized around in-depth analyses of contemporary Thai films and video art, which Fuhrmann uses to elaborate the practical applicability of a vast repertoire of new theoretical concepts that is developed throughout the book. Ghostly Desires looks at central aspects of Thai cultural production from minoritarian perspectives, with Fuhrmann deriving major inspirations from (queer) literary criticism. This approach is creatively combined with a Buddhologist reading of the ghostly in Thailand in an analysis of contemporary Thai nonheteronomative and minoritarian sexualities.

From this synthesis emerges a complex repertoire of theoretical concepts that will certainly contribute to the future articulation of queer positions in Thai studies, since all of these concepts critically address questions of gendered power and its invisible reproduction through a Buddhist-coded Thai common sense. Ghostly Desires contributes essentially to our understanding of minoritarian gendered personhood, queer sexualities, and their continuing social stigmatization by elaborating how Buddhist-coded readings of gender and sexuality inform Thai cultural politics. The book traces how Thailand's campaigns of “social ordering” (kan jad rabiap sangkhom) and “cultural monitoring” (kan fao rawang thang wathanatham) promote a new lexicon of sexual normativity that “brought into being new kinds of subjection of kathoeys, lesbians, and gay men while retaining older notions of their existential damagedness” (p. 25).

As a thoroughly queered text, the introduction advances several arguments simultaneously. It presents a kaleidoscopic picture of the book's central aim, which is stated explicitly only in the coda and identified as the opening up of new perspectives “on minoritized personhood and its place within the social, religious, and political orders in a period marked by the collapsing of temporal divisions into an enduring (neoliberal) present” (p. 186). Fuhrmann pursues this in order to examine “how a particular history of legal, social, and ontological negativity shapes understandings of sexual personhood and psychological interiority in contemporary Thailand” (p. 186).

Each of the four chapters is more or less exclusively dedicated to the oeuvre of one contemporary Thai director or video performer, with usually one film occupying center stage. In the first chapter, Fuhrmann examines the immensely popular Thai heritage film Nang Nak (Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999), which she uses to “investigate the role of femininity under the new parameters of sexual normalization in the heritage genre” in order to discuss “how the anachronisms of Buddhist haunting may be made available to a feminist analysis” (p. 15). The second chapter is dedicated to an analysis of the Hong Kong–Thai coproduced horror film The Eye (Khon Hen Phi, Oxide Pang and Danny Pang, 2002), “in which Buddhism functions as a trans-Asian idiom through which we can understand women's historical agency” (p. 15). Thailand's most internationally well-known director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and especially his award-winning 2004 Tropical Malady (Sat Pralat), are at the center of the third chapter, which analyzes the reimagination of male homosexuality in opposition to national projects of sexual regulation. The fourth chapter deviates from this approach by looking at the elaboration of a queer-feminist ideal in the performance video art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook (1997–2006). As a queered conclusion, the coda returns to film analysis in its consideration of Thunska Pansitthivorakul's independent film This Area is under Quarantine (Boriwen Ni Yu Phaitai Kankakkan, 2008).

The queer film analyses in Ghostly Desires are examples of the most detailed, thickly written, and demanding scholarly readings of Thai (ghost) films that currently exist. The first chapter has to be highlighted, as it displays a highly sophisticated and complex analysis of female haunting and its Buddhist-coding in contemporary Thai cinema. This chapter is probably the most rewarding for a general readership interested in Thai horror cinema, gender roles, female ghosts, and Buddhist soteriology.

Fuhrmann uses the individual chapters of her book to unpack the meaning of the Buddhist-informed critical concepts she outlines in the introduction. Based on her queer reading of Nang Nak in the first chapter, she explores the meaning of “Buddhist melancholia” in order to understand minoritarian sexualities in Thailand. The concept of Buddhist melancholia, however, reemerges throughout the book, and each application adds a further nuance to its complexity. In the end, one develops a vague feeling for its possible meanings, rather than being equipped with an explicit definition. The same is true for Fuhrmann's other core analytic concepts like “Buddhist-coded anachronism,” which is elaborated in the second chapter, and “Buddhist temporal incongruity,” which features most prominently in the third chapter.

Fuhrmann writes as an advocate for radical figurations of queerness, and she evaluates films on the basis of their potential to articulate queerness and minoritarian subjectivities in radical ways (p. 124). The goal of this radical form of queerness is not merely the toleration of minoritarian sexualities as part of a mainstream liberal culture, but the cultivation of a social plentitude that is culturally anchored in homosexuality (p. 157).

Ghostly Desires is a major contribution to the study of minoritarian sexuality and gendered personhood in contemporary Thailand that links sexuality and gender to cultural reproduction in the public sphere. It is a strong statement for the critical potential of queer theory in area studies research, especially for deconstructionist readings of Thai heteronormativity and the reproduction of its hegemony through various institutions and cultural politics. The book remains, however, haunted by Buddhism. Fuhrmann's Buddhist-coded reading of the ghostly in Thailand reintroduces a center to Thai contemporaneity that conjures up the specters of phallocentric asexuality and sabotages the successful queering of the cultural texts she analyzes.