Engendering Precarious Mobilities: Producing Masculinities and Femininities on the Thailand-Myanmar Border

• In Event: 537 - Regular Session. Masculinities and Intersectionality

Abstract

This paper asks how gender and sexuality are important tools on which migrants rely to make meaning in a context of displacement. Relying on a case study of Burmese migrants in a Thai border town, I consider gender a productive force, and I show how certain articulations of masculinity and femininity are part of a process of negotiating the challenges of a new and hostile place. Rather than presenting participants’ understandings of gender, I tease out the threads of gender-making from the interstices and intersections of migrants’ attempts to make order out of a harsh and unwelcoming everyday life in factories, farms, and among the waste piles of capital’s invisible underbelly on the border. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted on the Thailand-Myanmar border with 154 migrant participants between 2012 and 2014. I rely on discursive analysis to consider migrants’ narratives about the multiple forms of violence they encounter on a regular basis, including the structural violence of state exclusion and labor exploitation, the abuses perpetrated by state actors, employers, and gangs, and gender violence within the home. Findings suggest that migrants affirm particular gendered ideas as a way to achieve a sense of security, but that these reinforce patriarchal social structures which create added pressures on migrant women who also find themselves burdened with workplace demands and the responsibilities of social reproduction

Author

• Adam Saltsman, Boston College