Gendered encounters with modernity: Labor migrants and marriage choices in contemporary Thailand

This paper explores some of the tensions that arise in the course of young Thai women's rural‐urban labor migration. The rapid expansion of urban (and especially Bangkok‐based) manufacturing in contemporary Thailand targets young rural women as its primary labor force, a process that both relies on and challenges conventional gender relations and ideals. The experience of labor mobility engages migrants not only in national and transnational relations of production but also in the negotiation of hegemonic cultural images and identities, particularly those constituted by dominant (and gendered) discourses of and about Thai modernity. Courtship and marriage choices illustrate migrant women's attempts to maneuver within and against the constraints they face as members of a cheap, mobile labor force. In the process, however, these individualized efforts serve to reproduce rather than to challenge the structural and ideological conditions of their exploitation.