| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Scot Barmé. Woman, Man, Bangkok: Love, Sex, and Popular Culture in Thailand. (Asian Voices.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2002. Pp. vii, 273. Cloth $80.00, paper $27.95.

Scot Barmé reads the middle-class discourse around gender in early twentieth-century Siam (Thailand) as evidence of a widespread dissatisfaction with absolutist rule and elite prerogatives, dissatisfaction that culminated in the bloodless coup of 1932 and ushered in the modern polity. Unlike other countries in Southeast Asia, where nationalism emerged in response to domination by Western powers, Siam was never a European colony. Still, increasing literacy and mass media effected a similar engagement with the idea of modernity and an emergent sense of nationhood on a world stage. Anxiety about how Thailand appeared to foreigners was intense. Gender relations—specifically touchstones such as female education and polygamy—were used rhetorically in this era as a measure of the modern, and as indexes of the need for state reform.

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