In Northeast Thailand gendered patterns of labor migration insert rural residents
into privileged sites of national and international progress; yet, migrants and
their families remain marginalized within dominant constructions of contemporary
Thai modernity and development. This article explores these lived contradictions of
labor mobility through the ethnographic analysis of one sending community, focusing
on local discourses of, and about, the gendered disruptions of migration. Struggles
over shifting gender roles and meanings refigure the social displacements and
economic disparities surrounding labor mobility in ways that tend to highlight
individual problems rather than collective concerns or structural inequalities.
Consequently, while labor mobility offers some valued avenues for contesting rural
residents' exclusion from the benefits modelled by Thai ideologies of
modernity, its accompanying gendered discourses reinforce as much as challenge
existing patterns of marginalization.
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