The Contested Meanings of Female Sexualities through Alternative Interpretations of Thai Television Series among Young Female Audiences in Urban Chiang Mai, Thailand

Abstract

In opposite to most studies of youth media consumption which have usually approached them from the perspective of adulthood as well as downplayed a youth-centered interaction and their actual interpretations, this paper aims to explore various ways female youth audiences in urban Chiang Mai actively negotiated the conventional sexual discourse of female sexuality in famous Thai television series Dok Som See Thong (2011) and Hormones Wai Wa Woon (2013). Drawing on a four-year audience ethnographic study among thirteen female teenage audiences, this paper investigates various tactics how female youth-as active audiences-made sense of, negotiated, or even resisted the conventional discourse on female sexuality conveyed through media messages they encountered in everyday life. With a great respect to female youth agencies, this paper therefore suggests that young female audiences are not passive receptors of gender and sexual discourses conveyed through various social institutions-especially mass media messages. These female teenagers obviously demonstrated their ability to appropriate, transform or reproduce those popular series messages for their own meanings.