Beware of the Giant Monster and Its Minions: How Schoolgirls Negotiate Sexual Subjectivities in a Conservative School Climate in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand
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Abstract
Based on ethnographic fieldwork among a group of schoolgirls in urban Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, this paper explores various strategies in which the school and its allies operate to control, regulate, and suppress the sexual subjectivities of teenage girls. Focusing on schoolgirls’ agencies, the paper also discusses various tactics they deploy in order to appropriate, negotiate, and challenge the school’s efforts as reflected through their cultural and sexual practices in a daily life. This paper seeks deeper understandings of Thai teenage girl’s sexual agency and the ways they struggle to achieve a certain level of sexual autonomy within the school compound in the context of contemporary northern Thai society. In developing successful school-based sexuality education as well as HIV and STI prevention programs, greater respect to schoolgirls as active cultural agents is recommended; and their active participation in the process of program development, implementation and evaluation is therefore advised.
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