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Lack of Nostalgia Among Thai Marriage Migrants in the UK: A Gendered-Class Explanation
Lack of nostalgia among Thai marriage migrants in the UK: a gendered-class explanation
Chantanee Charoensri
Lecturer in Sociology
Thammasat University
Bangkok, Thailand
By the year 2000, a high percentage of Thai migrants to the UK, and maybe elsewhere in the world, are women. Among these, the number of women who migrated by means of marriage to local men is growing. This paper wants to show that whilst it is true that inter-regional inequality and socio-cultural factors, such as, gender equality, civic political culture and lifestyles do contribute to the overwhelming female emigration from Thailand; they are not enough to capture the heart of this trend. Supported by ethnographic data gathered in the UK between the year 2006-2010, I want to argue that this newly mass of Thai marriage migrants are pushed partly by their gendered-class experiences as rural Thai women of lower class. These experiences attribute to their migration understood from their point-of-view as an escape from class disrespect, isolation and relative deprivation. This structured experience also explains as to why their transnational attachment to Thailand is restricted to the women relatives in their hometown, whilst cultural attachment to their home country in general, displayed, for example, through nostalgia or the sense of belonging for the distant home; are missing.