Includes bibliographical references and index.

Buddhist sexual contemporaneity -- Nang Nak---Ghost wife: desire, embodiment, and Buddhist melancholia in a contemporary Thai ghost film -- The ghost seer: Chinese Thai minority subjectivity, female agency, and the transnational uncanny in the films of Danny and Oxide Pang -- Tropical malady: same-sex desire, casualness, and the queering of impermanence in the cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul -- Making contact: contingency, fantasy, and the performance of impossible intimacies in the video art of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook -- Coda. Under permanent exception: Thai Buddhist-Muslim coexistence, interreligious intimacy, and the filmic archive.

Through an examination of post-1997 Thai cinema and video art, Arnika Fuhrmann shows how vernacular Buddhist tenets, stories, and images combine with sexual politics in figuring current struggles over notions of personhood, sexuality, and collective life. The drama, horror, heritage, and experimental art films she analyses draw on Buddhist-informed conceptions of impermanence and prominently feature the motif of the female ghost.