Everyone knows something about Thailand. The country is known to many as the home of a wonderful cuisine, great package tours, beautiful islands and beaches, prostitution, fabulous silk, fake Rolex watches and magnificent temples. We learn about the country through tourist advertising, business and educational exchanges, films and news reports; these fragments reinforce the country's seductive appeal. For Thailand does not permit distancing, but rather sucks us into a sensual world of exotic sights, sounds, tastes, and smells.

Attraction to Thailand is partly aesthetic - the beauty of the country's natural and constructed environments; the Thai enjoyment of things beautiful - orchids, textiles, temples, people; the civility and grace of its peoples; their appreciation of the present moment, and the ease with which the ugly and painful is slipped out of sight. Only within the ascetic system of Theravada Buddhism is sensual pleasure denied, drawing even more attention to the beauty of ascetic simplicity made more striking beside baroque extravagance. Even the dramatic contrasts between wealth and poverty, between Buddhist denial and total indulgence, fascinate rather than repulse. There are no rewards for suppressing beauty and pleasure. This has been in the past and continues to be the fascination of Thailand for travellers and analysts alike.

The "Amazing Thailand Year" was celebrated in 1998 already. Even in the midst of financial crisis (like today!), Thailand amazes. Tourist materials for this campaign feature beautiful men and women wearing the heritage of Thailand on elaborate headdresses including flowers, Thai food, women from upland minorities, boats, Buddhist monks and Buddha images, flanked by Ban Chiang burial pottery, orchids, painted umbrellas, elephants and waterfalls. New Year's cards celebrating Amazing Thailand Year contained cardboard cutouts of miniature monuments including the Giant Swing, temple of the Emerald Buddha, temple of the Dawn, a guardian deity, and the reclining Buddha, all Bangkok-based tourist attractions.

You can buy anything in Bangkok. Women and representations of the feminine circulate much as other commodities in this very global market. As the cultural, economic and political centre of Thailand, Bangkok has a unique role in establishing cultural and gender hegemonies for the whole country. But Thailand also has a fluid, transnational identity that ranges beyond its national borders. Beauty contestants, factory workers, people with HIV/AIDS and prostitutes affect the representation of the Thai nation state, and of Thai women in Thailand and elsewhere.

Thailand encourages an essentialism of appearances or surfaces. These surfaces are gendered, and easily materialized and transformed through display, presentations, and everyday practices focussed on women as visual icons. Gendered prectices such as beauty contests and state rituals fetishize national images which serve both to exoticize and reify the essence of Thainess, enhancing the country's international reputation and tourist appeal. That is why the surface is so effective, the essence quickly grasped; the real is hidden and unchallenged. The surface is taken for the real. In the absence of critical examination of the discourses constructing these gendered surfaces, we all feel we know the real "Amazing Thailand".

In contemporary Thailand, two processes collide - those globalizing forces that draw Thailand and the Thai people and events onto the world stage, and those localizing forces that reify, exoticize and box Thai culture into opposition against global processes. This play between the surface exoticism of locality and global transnational processes creates the set of paradoxes and contradictions we have to explore. For the importance of fluidity, of surfaces and appearances belies the essentialism that makes it possible for outsiders - analysts and tourists alike - to grasp the essence of Thainess with such speed, certainty and satisfaction. This interpretive arrogance on the part of non-Thai is made possible because of well-developed cultural strategies and skills for constructing and maintaining this reified Thai essence through displays and representations which materialize Thai national identity.