Demystifying AIDS in Thailand: a dialectical analysis of the Thai sex industry

The AIDS pandemic throughout the world, and particularly in Thailand, is not just a physical disease that has evaded much of our control. It is symptomatic of a chronic, more pervasive and sinister plague that governs modern societies. This plague is social and political in nature. In the case of Thailand's AIDS pandemic, this paper argues that the underlying sociopolitical plague that further aggravates the AIDS crisis may be found in the internal contradictions that govern the Thai sex industry and its comodification of women and sex. It further suggests that current Thai management of the AIDS pandemic, though effective in terms of increasing the public's awareness about AIDS, its transmission modes and preventive measures, is less effective in the long run, because it fails to adequately address structural formations, contradictions, and practices that constitute and reproduce the Thai sex industry. Two objectives are attempted in this paper: first, a dialectical analysis of the internal contradictions in Thai society, as it relates to the sex industry, the family, and Buddhist institutions in Thailand; and, second, a line of response to the AIDS pandemic in Thailand.