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Abstract
Popular and academic discourses of globalization are often gender biased, focusing on formal and impersonal realms of the market, politics, and technologies. This article explores an intimate dimension of globalization by analyzing the transnational marriage trend among women in northeast Thailand (Isan's) villages. The phua farang (foreign husband) phenomenon in Isan epitomizes the intimate link between the global political economy and individuals' desires, aspirations, and imagination in the private realm of personal and marital relationships. The phua farang phenomenon is embedded in a context of spatial and economic inequalities at the local, national, and global levels, and manifests classed and gendered strategies by which marginalized subjects attempt to transcend the limited opportunities for upward social mobility available to these women.
Los discursos populares y académicos de globalización a menudo tienen un sesgo de género, centrándose sobre los ámbitos formales e impersonales del mercado, la política, y la tecnología. Este artículo explora una dimensión íntima de la globalización, analizando la tendencia hacia el matrimonio transnacional de las mujeres de las aldeas del noreste de Tailandia (Isan). El fenómeno del phua farang (esposo extranjero) en Isan epitomiza el lazo íntimo entre la economía política global y los deseos de los individuos, sus aspiraciones e imaginación en la esfera privada de las relaciones personales y maritales. El fenómeno del phua farang está insertado en un contexto de desigualdades espaciales y económicas a nivel local, nacional, y global, y manifiesta estrategias marcadas por la clase y el género por las que los sujetos marginalizados intentan trascender las limitadas oportunidades de ascenso social disponibles para estas mujeres.
有关全球化的大众与学术论述经常具有性别偏见，仅关注市场，政治与技术等正式和非个人的领域。本文透过分析泰国东北部伊山（Isan）部落中的女性跨国婚姻趋势，探讨全球化的亲密面向。在伊山，外国丈夫（phua farang）的现象，体现了全球政治经济与个人在私人及婚姻关系的私领域中的渴求，愿望及想象的亲密连结。外国丈夫的现象植基于地方，国家和全球层面空间与经济不平等的脉络，并展现边缘化主体企图超越其向社会上层流动的有限机会的阶级化与性别化策略。
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Dawn Currie, Alexia Bloch, Danielle Belanger, Jim Glassman, Abidin Kusno, Brenda Yeoh, Melody Yu, as well as anonymous GPC reviewers for comments on earlier versions of this article. Thanks and recognition are also due to the Royal Thai Government Scholarship and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the numerous research contacts and participants in Isan, particularly Prayong Khokdaeng, Director of Udon Thani Provincial Non-Formal Education Center, for their generous support.
Notes
1. These are fictional names for the two research villages, which are 2 km apart, a 45-minute drive from the urban center of Udon Thani, an Isan province, with a population of 1,527,500 on 11,730 km.2 Udon Thani was home to the Royal Thai Air Force bases used by the Americans during the Vietnam War. For more detailed description of the villages and its ongoing agrarian transformation, see Sunanta (Citation2009).
2. They include 16 local women; nine local men; 10 prominent community members, public officials, and elders; four foreign husbands or boyfriends; six members of families whose daughters are married to farang; and eight women in marital or romantic relations with foreign men.
3. In indigenous Isan peasant families, the groom joins the bride's family after marriage and the couple farm the land that the bride inherits from her parents. This pattern of post-marital residence and land inheritance gives Isan women a relatively high status in the family and the village community, constituted mostly by the women's kin. However, patriarchal believes and practices coexist in Isan social structure through Buddhist values attached to males and the custom of listing male as the head of the household and the holder of land title in official documents although women inherit the land. More recently, urbanization and capitalist transformation have led Isan parents to divide their dwindling farmland to both sons and daughters (Whittaker Citation1999).
4. Isan per capita income is only roughly one-fourth that of Bangkok metropolitan region (Ikemoto and Uehara Citation2000) and the gap has widened since the Thai economic boom in the 1980s (Pongpaichit 1993).
5. A rich feminist literature that explores the exercise of women's agency in transnational spaces, through their crucial roles in the domestic realm, includes the works of Barber (2000), Parrenas (2001a, 2001b, Citation2005), and Constable (1997).
6. Kaew's ex-husband did not go to Germany but instead went to Cambodia to work as a cook in a Casino.
7. Prae's alternative sexuality as a ‘tomboy’ or lesbian is interesting in itself to explore, but could not be given justice her given the limited space. Gendered notions of mia and phua farangs are by definition based on heterosexual relationships. We were not aware of any Thai woman in the two villages who had been supported or sponsored to live abroad by her lesbian foreign partner. In urban Thai social circles, there are gay men with foreign male partners. See Wilson (2004) on lesbian ‘tomboy’ culture in Thailand.
8. The monetary exchanges within tourist-oriented prostitution in Thailand are euphemistically called ‘gifts.’ The money women receive is not fixed and relationships that develop are flexible and unstructured, and in some cases continue for a protracted period; see Cohen (Citation1996, Citation2003) and Askew (Citation1998).
9. Duan's eldest daughter is now married and living with her husband.
10. These include sex, child bearing and rearing, attentiveness, or simply making up with one's foreign husband after a quarrel by preparing him clean clothing and breakfast when he gets up in the morning.