absolutelyBangkok archive · Culture & Arts
Originally published Jan. 8, 2010
Just stumbled upon this site:
Critical Asian Studies. A worthwhile read caught my eye: “Demanding Daughter Duty: Gender, Community, Village Transformation & Transnational Marriages in Northeast Thailand.” A study about the increased favorable acceptance of Isaan women with foreign partners. An in-depth study about a social phenomenon not known some years ago. From the site’s abstract:
The transnationalization of rural villages in the northeast region of Thailand through women’s transnational marriages is reconfiguring gendered familial obligations in the form of “daughter duty.” This article shows how economic and social remittances from dutiful village daughters who are married to foreign husbands connect local villages and communities to the global, bypassing Thai nation-state institutions and agencies that have inadequately addressed the disadvantageous position of Thailand’s Isaan region.
This transnational process depends on daughters’ (and mothers’) commitment to their care work and to their role as nurturers of the family, kin, schools, temples, and community — the community being seen as a familial extension in this matrilocal society. Women’s upward economic mobility and their adherence to valued filial roles contribute to the community’s increased favorable acceptance of women with foreign partners, leading to a greater number of transnational marriages.
This article offers a nuanced reading of the so-called phua farang phenomenon (transnational marriages) based on an analysis of transformations brought about by daughter duty and the agrarian changes taking place in villages in Thailand’s Isaan region as the result of the rapid growth of transnational marriages.
Some stigma has been removed. It’s not longer mainly about the daughter allowing the brother to finally buy a motorcycle or to buy dad that car. But those disapproving looks? And the “bad girl” perception of a mia farang (foreigner’s wife)? The complete article is not free, but worth a paid download right here.
For free you can download
Sirijit Sunanta
’s “Global Wife, Local Daughter: Gender, Family & Nation in Transnational Marriages in Northeast Thailand.” A same same but different study, but as said: free. Find the 190+ pages here.
An abstract:
This dissertation explains the emergence and continuous growth of transnational marriages in northeast Thailand through a gendered and localized analysis of globalization. The foreign husband (phua farang) phenomenon, or inter-racial/cross national marriages between Thai women and foreign men, has grown substantially in the last ten years, particularly in Issan or the northeast region of Thailand. In 2003 to 2004 as many as 15,000 women from Isaan provinces are married to or engaged in romantic relationships with foreign men mainly from Western European countries and the U.S. Transnationally married Issan women send remittances to their families, schools and temples, thus contributing to the economic and social transformation of agrarian villages in Thailand’s poorest region. The phua farang phenomenon among rural Isaan women, and the volume of revenue the phenomenon generates, perplex Thai society and stirs nation-wide debates. (Sirijit Sunanta) I demonstrates through combined gender, class and political economic analyzes how the phua farang phenomenon in Isaan is implicated in the interconnected “worlds” between the global and the local, the macro and micro scales, as well as the production and reproduction realms. Exploring localized global processes that take place at various scales — from the individual, the family and community, to the nation-state and the global political economy — this dissertation reveals on-going struggles between structural forces from “above” and everyday resistance on the ground by classed, ethnicized and gendered subjects exercising their agency. Internal struggles within the Thai nation, shown in ethnicized, classed, and gendered moral and nationalist discourses around the Phua Farang phenomenon, further problematize the dichotomy between the “colonizing global capitalism” and the much celebrated local alternatives to modernity.
Over to you.
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