A new study reveals how Western men use Thailand's Muay Thai fighting scene to perform masculinity, navigate vulnerability, and assert dominance
A provocative new study has revealed how Western men participating in Muay Thai fighting tourism in Thailand use the sport to perform and affirm white masculinity - often through complex, racialized encounters with Thai fighters.
The research by Jiange Deng, a PhD candidate in Geography at King's College London, draws on a year of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in Thai boxing gyms.
Deng, himself an Asian fighter, explores how white male tourists navigate fear, pain, and joy in the ring, constructing masculinity through physical endurance, emotional vulnerability, and symbolic domination.
Published in Gender, Place & Culture, the study finds that fear and injury are not seen as weaknesses but as rites of passage. Fighters reframe anxiety and physical harm as proof of courage and authenticity.
One participant described stepping into the ring as entering "enemy territory," while another likened Thailand's fight scene to the "wild west" - a colonial metaphor that romanticizes risk and rule-lessness, says Deng.
Thai fighters are simultaneously admired and exoticized. Their toughness is attributed not to biology but to cultural practices-training from childhood, enduring pain, and embodying the ideal of 'heart', or zai.
Jiange Deng, PhD candidate in Geography
Yet, beating a Thai opponent is often framed as a personal triumph, says Deng, reinforcing a subtle narrative of Western dominance.
"Western fighters frequently adopt Thai fighting styles and rituals, which paradoxically enhance their own sense of achievement. While Thai masculinity is exalted, it is also selectively appropriated - stripped of its queer and Buddhist dimensions to fit a Western ideal of hard masculinity."
Deng argues that Muay Thai tourism creates a "Muay Thai industrial complex" - a postcolonial space where white masculinity is performed, affirmed, and exported.
"The sport becomes a stage for emotional and physical transformation, but also for reproducing colonial hierarchies and racialized power dynamics," he said.
Read the paper:
Deng, J. (2025). 'I beat a Thai': performing white masculinity in Thailand's Muay Thai fighting tourism. Gender, Place & Culture, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2025.2523893
