Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves
Most research on female labor migration in Thailand focuses on that country's infamous sex industry. Mary Beth Mills offers the first extended ethnographic analysis of rural women's movement into less visible occupations, paying particular attention to the hundreds of thousands of young women who fill the factories and sweatshops of the Bangkok metropolis. Mills follows the women as they travel from the village of Baan Naa Sakae to Bangkok, where they encounter new forms of consumption, new...
Search in google:
Most research on the female labor force in Thailand focuses on that country's infamous sex industry. Mary Beth Mills offers the first extended ethnographic analysis of less visible occupations, paying particular attention to the hundreds of thousands of young rural women who migrate to Bangkok to fill the factories and sweatshops of the metropolis. She sees this rural-urban migration as an elaborate process of cultural change, with broad implications for the future of the labor force. Mills describes key aspects of rural Thai community life, such as local consumer practices, gender roles, and the familial tensions that are often the catalysts for labor migration. She then focuses on the underlying tensions of urban employment as migrants pursue newly imagined identities as modern women, while still upholding economic and moral responsibilities to rural kin. By departing from the most common ethnographic portrayals of Thai women—as peasants or prostitutes—this book expands our understanding of how gender and gender relations are constructed, contested, and transformed in contemporary Thai society.
List of FiguresAcknowledgments1Women, Migration, and Thai Experiences of Modernity12Village and Nation263Cash, Commodities, and Modernity474Parents, Children, and Migration Decisions745Gender and Mobility926Bangkok Wage Workers1097Consumption, Desire, and Thansamay Selves1278Courtship, Marriage, and Contested Selves1479Gender and Modernity, Local and Global Encounters163Notes171Glossary of Thai Words and Pronunciation Guide187References193Index203
