Based on original research in Northern Thailand and drawing on the breadth of indigenous Thai language materials, this study offers a sustained and powerful criticism of the normative modeling of the Thai AIDS epidemic in order to elicit new and more effective points of intervention.

Drawing on the case of HIV/AIDS in Thailand, this book examines how anthropological and other interpretative social science research has been utilized in modeling the AIDS epidemic, and in the design and implementation of interventions. It argues that much social science research has been complicit with the forces that generated the epidemic and with the social control agendas of the state, and that as such it has increased the weight of structural violence bearing upon the afflicted. The book also questions claims of Thai AIDS control success, arguing that these can only be made at the cost of excluding categories such as intravenous drug users, the incarcerated, and homosexuals, who continue to experience extraordinarily high levels of levels of HIV infection. Considered deviant and undeserving, these persons have deliberately been excluded from harm reduction programs. Overall, this work argues for the untapped potential of anthropological research in the health field, a confident anthropology rooted in ethnography and a critical reflexivity. Crucially, it argues that in context of interdisciplinary collaborations, anthropological research must refuse relegation to the status of an adjunct discipline, and must be free epistemologically and methodologically from the universalizing assumptions and practices of biomedicine.

Men Who Sell Sex is the first comprehensive international account of male prostitution and AIDS. While much is known about female prostitution and sex work, relatively little is known about men who sell sex - either to women or other men. This book brings together an authoritative collection of essays from different countries and examines sexual behaviour, the reasons men sell sex, the meanings involved, and implications for HIV prevention. The authors are all experts in their fields and individual chapters offer a compelling description of the reasons men sell sex and the pleasures and risks involved.

Many foreign observers of the "Land of Smiles" are familiar with a narrow range of gender relations and sexual practices in Thailand, from the fanciful portrayal of 19th-century harem life in The King and I, to recent media coverage of sex tourism and AIDS. Yet serious study of patterns of sexuality, femininity, and masculinity in Thailand is relatively new. This book is a rare collection by scholars from around the world and across social disciplines who are tackling these issues. The essays urge the reader to look beyond fantasies of Thailand as an "oriental sexual paradise" or "land of sexploitation" to historical and contemporary forms of gender and eroticism. Studies of the changing opinions and practices among villagers and urbanites, the creative expressions of novelists and aristocrats, and the concerns of early women's magazines and recent AIDS-prevention campaigns, reveal the extraordinary diversity of debates about gender and sexual issues in 20th-century Thailand. Avoiding simplistic approaches to gender studies and sexuality research, the authors discuss how interpretations of gender roles, marriage, and intimate relationships differ between men and women; cultural regions; Thai and immigrant Chinese communities; and heterosexually and homosexually active groups--as well as between residents of Thailand and their foreign observers. By questioning accounts of Thailand as a place where gender is fluid and sexuality is free, the book unravels the complex processes by which Thai men and women understand themselves, appealing to both general readers and scholars of Thai society. Peter A. Jackson is fellow in Southeast Asian history at Australian National University. Nerida M. Cook is lecturer in sociology at the University of Tasmania.