This paper argues that resistance should not be understood solely as overt
confrontation with power but also as affective and situational practices through which
people navigate and rework domination. Focusing on the Thai queer online
community Nong, it examines how humor functions as an ambiguous, playful, and
non-confrontational mode of resistance. Nong unsettles authoritarian power and
liberal grammars of respectability, moral seriousness, and rights-based propriety.
Through parody, irony, and incongruity, participants mobilize humor to create spaces
of collective survival, critique, and pleasure under surveillance. Rather than
advancing stable political demands, these practices foreground ambiguity, affect, and
joy.
Building on and intervening in scholarship on resistance, this paper introduces
the concept of queer vernacular resistance to capture forms of political action that
operate outside dominant models of protest, mobilization, or rights-claiming. While
much of the existing literature has drawn attention to hidden or infra-political
practices, it has often under-theorized affect, play, and queer world-making as
constitutive dimensions of resistance. Queer vernacular resistance foregrounds
humor as a political grammar through which critique, refusal, and negotiation are
articulated without fixed positions or moral certainty. This mode of resistance
unsettles both authoritarian repression and liberal activist norms by refusing
demands for seriousness, coherence, and respectability. It highlights how resistance
The 1st ‘Intergalactic’ Conference on Resistance Studies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA, on June 18-21, 2026
can be simultaneously critical and complicit, playful and political, marginal yet
consequential.
Methodologically, the paper draws on online and offline ethnographic research
with the Nong community. The empirical materials, including memes, posts,
comment threads, images, and vernacular expressions circulating across multiple
platforms, alongside observations from offline events, are analyzed as both affective
and discursive practices with attention to how humor circulates, accumulates
meaning, and organizes social relations. Treating humor as both an ethnographic
object and an analytical lens, this study examines how parody, irony, and play
function as techniques for negotiating power, sustaining collectivity, and reworking
political meaning in everyday life.
This paper aims to contribute to resistance studies by expanding prevailing
conceptions of resistance toward affective, vernacular, and relational practices.
Besides, it shows how queer forms of world-making operate as infrastructures of
resistance under conditions of authoritarianism and moral regulation. Finally, it
demonstrates how resistance may be enacted through ambiguity rather than clarity,
pleasure rather than sacrifice, and play rather than discipline. Thereby, the paper
argues for taking the political force of queer humor seriously as a site where power is
negotiated, norms are unsettled, and alternative ways of living together are
imaginatively sustained.