Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves / Edition 1

by Mary Beth Mills

Overview

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 "modern" lifestyles, and a new sense of identity. She finds this rural-urban migration is more than a simple economic activity, but rather an elaborate process of cultural change.

Mills describes the environments from which these women left, as well as the urban landscape they now call home. Hence, she examines key aspects of rural Thai community life, such as local consumption practices, gender roles, and the familial tensions that are often the catalyst to labor migration. Then she focuses on the city and 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813526546
Publisher:	Rutgers University Press
Publication date:	04/01/1999
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

MARY BETH MILLS is an assistant professor of anthropology at Colby College.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1 Women, Migration and Thai Experiences of Modernity
2 Village and Nation
3 Cash, Commodities, and Modernity
4 Parents, Children, and Migration Decisions
5 Gender and Mobility
6 Bangkok Wage Workers
7 Consumption, Desire, and Thansamay Selves
8 Courtship, Marriage, and Contested Selves
9 Gender and Modernity, Local and Global Encounters
Notes Glossary of Thai Words and Pronunciation Guide
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

Diane L. Wolf

Mills presents a thorough and complex picture of the kinds of changes and challenges confronting young Thai women today.
(Diane L. Wolf, author of Factory Daughters.)

Penny Van Esterik

By writing powerfully and sensitively about Thailand's increasingly feminized workforce, Mary Beth Mills has provided the ethnography with enough theoretical power to generate important questions for the next decade.
(Penny Van Esterik, Professor of Anthropology, York University.)