The effects of female urban migration on rural Thai household and village structures

Abstract

Throughout the world the increasing accessibility of transportation and communication technologies has facilitated a rise in worker migration patterns and transnationalism. While migration is by no means a new topic, it is my belief that any research performed on migration or transnationalism needs to account for gender relations, because, to quote Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, "gender relations shape immigration patterns, and in turn, migration experiences reshape gender relations"( Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994:3). Gender influences migration patterns, because many workers engage in occupations that are gender specific. Male migrants frequently work in agriculture, construction, or other fields that require heavier manual labor; meanwhile, female migrants often work in industries like domestic employment. Additionally, a migrant's familial gender roles both influence migration patterns and also change as result of these patterns. In their research on international migrant workers from Mexico and the Philippines, ethnographers Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas analyzed the emergence of transnational families. In these families, parents work abroad and their absence promotes changes in both child-rearing and other household practices, as well as transformations to the migrants' origin communities (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Parreñas 2002). Such changes can lead to social stresses and frictions. For example, in her research on the children of Filipino international migrant workers, Parreñas explored the feelings of abandonment and longing that these children encountered as a result of their parents working abroad (Parreñas 2002). While these ethnographers focus on transnational families, such social changes are by no means limited to international worker migration, but are also applicable to rural-urban migration and other domestic population flows. This thesis will cover a less explored topic of how a nation's internal worker migrations can promote comparable changes to gender relations of migrants, their families and their communities. In so doing, it opens up this new path of investigation because even though domestic migrants do not go abroad and are able to visit their origin communities more frequently; they are still removed from their families and villages, and therefore have the potential to similarly alter the dynamics of rural households and communities.