Description
Book SynopsisThe chapters in this volume study transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between âordinaryâ people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and âthe Westâ. While Thai and Western peopleâs social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, this book considers it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration.
Even though a focus on the âpersonal life storiesâ of marriage migrants provides valuable insights, it can also mask consideration of the structural context of socially embedded cross- border connections and exchanges, as well as state restrictions, that, first, make peopleâs decisions to move a possibility in the first place, and second, shape a migrantâs post- migration life- trajectory and experiences, relative to others in their origin and settlement societies. The chapters on Thai women who marry and move with older Western men
Table of Contents
1. Introduction – Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both- ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross- border connections between people, states, and places 2. Globalising the Thai ‘high- touch’ industry: exports of care and body work and gendered mobilities to and from Thailand 3. Living the long- term consequences of Thai- Western marriage migration: the radical life- course transformations of women who partner older Westerners 4. Thai wives in Europe and European husbands in Thailand: how social locations shape their migration experiences and engagement with host societies 5. Practising privilege. How settling in Thailand enables older Western migrants to enact privilege over local people 6. Transnational intimacy and economic precarity of western men in northeast Thailand 7. Intergenerational strategies: the successes and failures of a Northern Thai family’s approach to international labour migration 135
