Authors:Patacharin Lapanun Abstract: Studies of transnational intimacies and marriages thus far reveal how these intimate relationships are simulated and constrained by global and local circumstances, cultures, ideas, and practices relating to gender, marriage, and family as well as class and ethnicity. This paper provides insights into the other side of the global process by exploring how these intimate relations generate tensions and challenge cultural ideas and practices regarding gender and social class at the ‘local end’ of the transnational connections. Drawn on three ethnographic studies in two northeastern Thai villages, my research argues that these marital relationships present a form of women’s agency and bring new challenges to masculine identities and subjectivities, placing local men in vulnerable positions. Women with Western partners also constitute a new class determined by both their consumption and their lifestyle – which set them apart from other villagers – and their increased ownership of both farm and residential land. Thus, these women form a new class in both Bourdieusian and Marxist senses, although land in this case has less to do with production but rather wellbeing, security, and prosperity. In this light, transnational marriages/intimacies induce the reconfiguring of gender and class in women’s natal villages. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0073 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Cheera Thongkrajai Abstract: Many queer foreigners perceive Thailand as a gay paradise. They have an image of the country as having a tolerant attitude towards LGBTIQ+. However, for Thai LGBTIQ+, Western countries evoke wealth, progress, and acceptance where people with a different gender identity or sexual orientation can fully enjoy their rights. Thai LGBTIQ+, like men and women, strive to go abroad seeking a life they dream of. This article aims to give an account of one of these marginalized groups’ experience that is often neglected by both Thai and Western transnational scholars. Based on an ethnographic study in four European countries with 26 Thai transgender informants, this article argues that migration needs to be considered as a search for one’s well-being, not only in terms of economic aspects, but also in terms of sentimental or emotional needs – that is, the possibility of living their gender and being socially and legally accepted. In this transcultural context, not only do people move across borders, but they also export with them perceptions and understandings about sex, gender, and sexuality from their home country. These aspects are renegotiated and rearticulated in the new socio-cultural milieu of the host countries in order to maximize these new conditions for their own interest. They may or may not reveal their transgender identity, depending on contexts, social interactions, and whom they are dealing with. Their transgender identity can offer them advantages, particularly in the realm of sex. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0077 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sarah Scuzzarello, Paul Statham Abstract: This article studies the aspirations and experiences of kathoey (Thai male-to-female trans* people) from poor rural Isan in enduring cross-border relationships with Western men. Drawing from biographical life stories, we try to unpack the cultural script through which partnering a Western man is seen as a plausible pathway for a better kathoey life in Thailand. We study the opportunities such partnering presents for achieving goals of gender affirmation, social advancement, and re-gaining merit within family relations. In the face of significant discriminatory barriers, kathoey in our study managed to build lives that they saw as self-validating, materially successful, and significantly conferring gender recognition. They understood their relationships as socially and personally much more than access to financial resources and drew important sources of emotional support, especially for gender validation from them. Western men were seen as more dedicated to partnering, caring, and being publicly seen in social settings (including family), compared to Thai. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0074 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sirijit Sunanta Abstract: This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 inter-views with Thai migrants in Brighton, East Sussex. It explores how Thai immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and migration pathways mobilize ethnic and non-ethnic forms of capital in their entrepreneurial activities. Thai immigrants constitute a relatively new, small, but internally diverse migrant population in the UK, with female marriage migrants dominating the Thai migrant population in the past two decades. The findings of this study reveal that Thai migrants tend to own small-scale businesses or provide personal services in three sectors: cleaning and care work, beauty and massage, and food and catering. In their interaction with opportunity structures in the UK, Thai restaurant and massage entrepreneurs mobilize the exotic notion of “Thai-ness” to add value to their services catering to local British customers. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0078 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot Abstract: The Thai migration to Belgium is numerically a woman-led phenomenon, which has captured social attention for the last decades. This attention entails stereotypes about Thai migrant women as ‘workers’ in the intimate industry and/or ‘exotic wives’ of Belgian men. To challenge these stereotypes, the present paper explores the often-ignored dimension of Thai women’s sociality. Specifically, it examines the transmission dynamics occurring in their Buddhist social spaces, which shape and reinforce their sense of belonging. To do so, it draws from ethnographic fieldwork with Thai migrant women and key social actors within the Thai population in the country. Data analysis unveils that these women engage in multiform modes of transmission in their Buddhist social spaces. First, they transmit good deeds from the material world to the spiritual realm through merit-making practices and by seeking spiritual guidance in the temple. Second, they pass their socio-cultural ways of belonging to their children by engaging in different socializing activities. And third, they involve themselves in sharing religious faith, material symbols, and tastes described as part of Thai culture. Through this multiform transmission, Thai migrant women confront in subtle ways the common-held views about them at the intersection of their various identities as spouses, mothers, citizens, and Buddhist devotees. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0079 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Panitee Brown Abstract: This paper applies the notions of mobility, mobility capital, gender, and ageing to analyze marriage migration and the trajectories of geographical and social mobility of Thai-Dutch couples moving from the Netherlands to Thailand. It is based on in-depth interviews with 12 Thai-Dutch couples who moved from the Netherlands to Thailand and resided in Thailand for between three and twelve years. The study explores the key role of mobility capital in stimulating Thai-Dutch couples’ imaginations, their perceptions, and their potential for movement. In terms of their ‘mobility turn’, I argue that their trajectories of mobility and relocation to Thailand should not be understood as a linear and permanent movement from the Netherlands to Thailand. Rather, this mobility is fluid, complicated, and sometimes fragmented. It is marked by the practices of waiting, hesitation to move, imagining their return, preparing to move, having actually returned, and travelling back and forth between Thailand and the Netherlands. It also encompasses local spatial move-ment in daily life. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0080 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Wei Lee Chin, Najib Noorashid Abstract: Effective communication plays a part in the success and the sustainability of tourism and hospitality management, including community-based tourism (CBT). In Brunei Darussalam, communication barriers have affected the growth of the CBT industry at both local and national levels. By analysing responses from 16 local CBT operators, this investigation focuses on aspects of communication and its channels in securing sustainability and empowerment of the CBT industry. This study found that the CBT ventures in Brunei include: (1) horizontal/lateral communication between CBT operators and sur-rounding communities; and (2) top-down communication and bottom-up accessibility between authorities, community leaders, and CBT owners. This paper further discusses how bureaucracy can impede the success of CBT operations, and how a collaborative approach between stakeholders has inspired the formulation of a new Interactional Model of Leadership and Empowerment among CBT stakeholders, which can be used to measure the efficacy of communication among stakeholders in the CBT industry. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0075 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Sirijit Sunanta, Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot Abstract: The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president of Thai Women Network in Europe (TWNE), was originally conducted in English over email by Sirijit Sunanta and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot in July 2022. It was supplemented by an online interview (via WebEx) in Thai by Sirijit Sunanta in November 2022. Mrs. Grimsmann served as the President of TWNE from 2019 to 2022. TWNE is well-established and one of the most active organizations of Thai migrant women with individual and organizational members in 16 European countries, the US, and Thailand. TWNE seeks to collaborate with governmental and non-governmental organizations, both in Thailand and the destination countries, to improve the welfare of Thai migrant women. They organize annual general meetings to discuss topics relevant to Thai migrant women’s lives in destination countries and publish an annual newsletter Sarn Satree (สารสตรี) to circulate information. Mrs. Grimsmann has extensive experience of providing community service as a social volunteer and working with international organizations, particularly in the area of women and children’s welfare. She is now based in France and Thailand. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0082 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot, Sirijit Sunanta Abstract: The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which different stereotypes regarding Thais and Europeans emerge, perpetuate, and circulate, thereby affecting to various extents the lives of these individuals. To challenge these stereotypes, the present Special Issue takes into account the mechanisms of social categorization at transnational and local dimensions in three critical steps. First, it adopts an inclusive stance by not limiting itself to heterosexual relationships involving Thais and Europeans. Second, it shifts the scholarly gaze from marriage and family issues to Thai migrants’ mobilities in spatial, social, and intergenerational terms. And third, it highlights Thai migrants’ engagement in the labor market as intimate workers and entrepreneurs to uncover the factors shaping their (re)productive labor and social incorporation in their receiving countries. Using an intersectional approach, this Special Issue presents six empirically grounded case studies to unveil often-neglected dimensions and complexities of Europe-Thailand transnational migration. PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0076 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
Authors:Yi Sheng Goh, Pek Yen Teh Abstract: Festivals play a vital role in catalyzing inclusive development through their ability to in-crease social capital. They can enhance social ties through creating shared knowledge, building trust, and forming networks. In the Malaysian context, few studies have been done on how festivals promote inclusive development. Hence, this paper seeks to present a case study on Pangkor Island Festival (PIF), which is a Malaysian arts and culture festival, concerning the process, opportunities, and challenges of inclusive development from the perspectives of the festival organizer. In-depth interviews with the festival organizer and curator and field observations were conducted. Findings show that festivals promote inclusive development through a five-phase process, from establishing relationships with residents and exploring local assets to the sustainability of PIF and inclusive development. This study also suggests three-fold opportunities that include community cohesiveness, revitalization, and cultural value restoration as well as challenges of securing suitable stakeholders PubDate: 2022-12-23 DOI: 10.14764/10.ASEAS-0081 Issue No:Vol. 15, No. 2 (2022)
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