EXAMINING THE AMBIGUOUS ALLURE OF THE FARANG - THAI MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN AND FARANG MEN By CHRISTINE WESTER MSc Contemporary Asian Studies Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Amsterdam 2016 Student No. 11129158 [email protected] Word count: 25,194 Dr. Olga Sooudi Supervisor ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This is not the thesis I thought I was going to write and my endeavour turned out to become challenging on both the academic and the personal level. I have been interested in transnational relationships - not only romantic relationships - for a long time and by starting this study I was able to commit myself to this topic for many months. Soon after engaging in academic literature and numerous conversations with people in the field, I changed my approach and began rethinking my own conceptions about people´s relationships and gender orders. Writing this thesis about transnational relationships would not have been possible without the work of other researchers on whose work I relied and who I mention and quote throughout this thesis. I owe special debt to the following people whose support is crucial to this study and the completion of my thesis: my thesis supervisor, Dr. Olga Sooudi, for her academic guidance, dedication, and mentorship much needed throughout the process, the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom for its financial support without which I would not have been able to finish my studies, but also for the valuable network it provided me, and my mother for her steady support in various ways during my studies. My biggest "thank you" goes to the women and men who shared their experiences of Bangkok city dating life with me and to the many people who introduced me to these wonderful places and sources of information and inspiration. I was often surprised and deeply touched by their stories. My hope is that this thesis does them justice. LIST OF FIGURES 1 Sky Train station Chong Nonsi and Empire building ...............................................10 2 Textbook I used during my Thai language course ....................................................14 3 Girls taking selfies in front of Siam Paragon ............................................................15 4 Bargirls in Sukhumvit Soi 11 ....................................................................................20 5 Sririta Jensen, a Danish-Thai model .........................................................................33 6 How to behave like a lady as taught in schools.........................................................44 7 Vocabulary chart teaching children that dark skin is ugly ........................................51 8 Bridging the language barrier ...................................................................................56 TABLE OF CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................1 Motivation and relevance .........................................................................................1 Research question and objectives ............................................................................4 Thesis outline ...........................................................................................................5 Methodology ............................................................................................................5 Interviews ...........................................................................................................6 Participant observation .......................................................................................6 News articles, blogs, and online forums ............................................................7 Research site ............................................................................................................8 Research population ...............................................................................................10 The researcher as the "Other" ................................................................................13 II. GENDERED EXPERIENCES IN A METROPOLIS ............................................15 Class is in everything and everywhere ...................................................................17 "Women are like candy" ........................................................................................19 "My family puts pressure on me" ..........................................................................21 "They don´t treat women with respect" .................................................................22 Discussion and conclusion .....................................................................................26 III. FARANGNESS AND FARANGIZATION .........................................................28 The imperialism of gender and sexualities ............................................................30 Transforming Thai-Farang intimacy ......................................................................32 ! IV. COURTSHIP IN BANGKOK ...............................................................................35 Relationship status and idioms of practice ............................................................35 Don´t eat fruits before they are ripe ......................................................................39 Discussion and conclusion .....................................................................................43 V. BEING SINGLE - CHOICE OR FATE? ...............................................................45 Women´s expectations toward a partner ................................................................46 Society´s expectations toward women ...................................................................50 Not all farang are good ..........................................................................................54 VI. THE MIA FARANG DILEMMA ........................................................................53 The origin of mia farang ........................................................................................56 Strategies to avoid stigmatization ..........................................................................62 VII. CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION .................................................................65 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................70 APPENDICES .............................................................................................................83 ! CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Motivation!and!relevance! I was already in Bangkok for my field research when I found an article on the thaivisa.com forum1, which incited a lively discussion within the community. A member of the community posted the findings of a Thai researcher, which indicated the emergence of a trend of young, educated women marrying white men. “Before I conducted this research, I thought that Thai women marry white men from economic necessity, but after I studied the situation, I changed my mind,” said Supichaya, who studied the trend through matchmaking websites, targeting Thai women and white men. Supichaya2 further elaborated that these women are well educated and financially quite independent in comparison with the former generation, which mostly came from the working class in Isan3 (Thaivisa: website 2016). Popular opinion about Thai women entering relationships with white men from a Western country4 have been dominated by a set of stereotypes, which are that marrying a foreigner is primarily motivated by economic security concerns, the desire for upward mobility (hypergamy), and is the product of structural inequalities between different parts of the world (Constable 2003:13). Moreover, stereotypes are derived from what scholars traditionally refer to as "Orientalism" (Said 1978), which is an entrenched structure of thought and a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as the Orient. In the colonial period, images of the Orient were largely aimed at depicting the people as inferior and backward in order to explain the righteousness of colonization. These images persist in the post-colonial era although in more subtle forms and may not directly be recognized as the legacy of colonial !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 thaivisa.com is probably the biggest expat website in Thailand with a mailing list of more than 300.000. 2 I tried to get in contact with the researcher, the faculty that was mentioned in the article, and her supervisor, but was not successful 3 The Isan region is in the northeast of Thailand. It is one of the poorest regions in Thailand. I will give a more detailed description of its relevance in chapter 5. 4 In this thesis, the term "Western countries" includes Europe and countries of European colonial origin with European ancestral populations (North-America, Canada, and Oceania). 1!! ! attitudes (Pissa-ard 2009:8). Furthermore, Mohanty (1988) outlined in her study "Under Western Eyes" the ways in which Euro-American scholarly studies of Third World women tend to reduce them to essentials in a way that deprives them of agency and that reasserts superiority of Western countries. One of the most prominent features of Thailand´s global image concerns the prostitution industry, which has inspired a disproportionate amount of literature on women in Thailand and dominates Euro-American scholars´ perception of gender analysis (Cook and Jackson 1999:12), which is offensive to both Thai