Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves - Softcover

Mills, Mary Beth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081352654X ISBN 13: 9780813526546

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1999

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Synopsis

This text is an ethnographic examination of young women migrants in rural and urban Thailand. The author focuses on the hundreds of thousands of young women who fill the factories and sweatshops of the Bangkok metropolis, following them as they travel from the village of Baan Naa Sakae.

About the Author

Mills is an associate professor of anthropology at Colby College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 081352654X
• ISBN 13: 9780813526546
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238