Under Permanent Exception: Thai Buddhist-Muslim Coexistence, Interreligious Intimacy, and the Filmic Archive

The coda tweaks the question of Buddhism’s relation to sexuality still further by investigating notions of Buddhist-Muslim intimacy in the independent cinema of Thunska Pansittivorakul (This Area Is under Quarantine, 2008). This film was produced in the context of the perpetual state of emergency since 2004 in Thailand’s three southern Muslim-majority provinces. The analysis gauges the critical potential of interethnic intimacies in a situation in which violence is continuously perpetrated by a central state that defines itself as Buddhist. The coda thereby considers yet another positioning of Buddhism vis-à-vis sexuality and liberalism.