Queering Win Lyovarin’s Democracy, Shaken, and Stirred: The Entanglement of Politics, Desire, and Transtextuality
Keywords:
Thai novel, queer, queer studies, paratextAbstract
Win Lyovarin’s Democracy, Shaken, and Stirred is a distinguished work, as it was graced by the S.E.A. Write Award in 1997 and continues to interest scholars and critics with its experimental literary devices. Nevertheless, the novel is categorized within the genres of historical novels and political novels. This research aims at alternatively analyzing the novel with special reference to the implicit queer desire between two male protagonists. The theoretical framework is based on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas of male homosocial desire and Gérard Genette’s concept of transtextuality. It is found that male homosexual desire is encoded in Democracy, Shaken, and Stirred through the symbolic system. The architextuality of the novel likewise suggests male exclusive space through the grammars of action-adventure novels, the western and wu xia genres. Furthermore, the novel’s paratexts, particularly the covers of different editions, are filled with phallic symbols in a misogynistic manner. All contribute to the materialization of male homosexual desire. This research is an example of an analytical queer reading of a Thai literary canon, which illustrates the potential of this approach to enrich the study of contemporary Thai literature.
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