Gendered encounters with modernity: Labor migrants and marriage choices incontemporary 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 y oung 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 rela tions of production but also in the negotiation of hegemonic cultural image s and identities, particularly those constituted by dominant (and gendered) discourses of and about Thai modernity. Courtship and marriage choices ill ustrate migrant women's attempts to maneuver within and against the constra ints they face as members of a cheap, mobile labor force. In the process, h owever, these individualized efforts serve to reproduce rather than to chal lenge the structural and ideological conditions of their exploitation.