Women in the city of consumption: Markets and the construction of gender in Bangkok, Thailand.
Item
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Title
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Women in the city of consumption: Markets and the construction of gender in Bangkok, Thailand.
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Identifier
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AAI9808021
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identifier
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9808021
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Creator
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Wilson, Ara A.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Shirley Lindenbaum
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Date
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1997
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural | Women's Studies
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Abstract
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This dissertation is an historic and ethnographic study of the relation between changing forms of markets and the construction of femininity in Thai society, based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork, library research, and textual analysis. Contemporary Bangkok is comprised of an array of markets which involve women as sellers, consumers, and also as symbols. Noting that women's engagement with markets is long-standing or even "traditional," I argue that in fact Thai female identities are, and have been, defined by and through market relations. The thesis explores varying ways through which the identities of Thai women are expressed and revised--or constructed--within six different "modern" venues for buying and selling in Bangkok. These venues are: Chinatown and Sino-Thai shophouses, department stores, malls, the sex industry for foreign tourists, marketing and telecommunications industries, and direct sales. Overall, these distinct but overlapping markets illustrate the ways that gender ideals and behaviors have transformed in relation to Bangkok's development from a royal entrepot to a world city intersected by transnational flows of commerce, capital, tourism, and mass media.;Through the history of the Sino-Thai merchant class and the innovative department store, I explore the relationships between ethnicity, gender, and economy in the development of Bangkok as a "city of consumption." Thailand's modernization project involved a contrast between female- and family-based markets and professional retail which shapes contemporary understandings about women's economic roles. Next, I examine the "economies of intimacy" involved as young women negotiate intimate relationships in sites of commercial leisure markets, exploring the cases of women enacting a tom (lesbian or transgendered) identity in malls and of workers in the sex industry of Patpong. Turning to transnational markets, I examine the ways upwardly-mobile or elite Thais navigate the gender and class constraints of their local changing social worlds by using the international knowledge and symbols derived from work at a cable television company and in direct sales (e.g., Avon, Amway).
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
