Bangkok middle-class spectatorship and social realist media: contesting modernity through visualizing Muslim minorities

ABSTRACT Since the escalation of violence in the three southern border provinces of Thailand began in 2004, the body of literature on Thai Muslims has grown, with newer works offering fresh insights into the deep-rooted conflict. That said, scholarly works gauging the interplay between media portrayals of Muslim minorities and ideological works are surprisingly scarce. To fill the gap, this article examines social realist media, namely films and a music video, produced in the 1980s. Drawing on visual culture and Thai postcolonial studies as theoretical underpinnings, it seeks to illuminate the interplay between Bangkok middle-class spectatorship and Muslim minorities by framing them within Thailand’s postcolonial context. The findings show that visual references to Muslimness are made to connote inferiority vis-à-vis the supposedly modern Bangkok middle class. The article argues that, in the 1980s, the visuality of Muslimness enabled the newly formed Bangkok middle classes to forge a superior visual subjectivity while perpetuating ‘Muslim others’ as a group in need of development by the aforementioned middle class. Furthermore, emerging from the postcolonial world, visuality became a site of struggle in which the emerging classes contested the notion of modernity that had hitherto been exclusively intertwined with the elites.