Beyond Victims and Survivors: Discourses of Gender and Migration in Thailand

Abstract

This research examines how key development actors – notably the Thai government, the UN Women Regional Office for Asia-Pacific (UN Women ROAP), and Thai NGOs – construct discourses about female migrants and associated subjects in Thailand, and how these discourses create complicit relations and specific political affordances. This research shows that female migrants are situated in relation to refugees, migrants, and trafficking subjects, shaped by the historical context of Indochinese colonialism. This colonial legacy is sanitized through contemporary anti-trafficking and women's economic empowerment discourses by the three actors. The Thai government constructs female victims of trafficking as feminized and infantilized victims, embodying paternalistic masculinity that securitizes trafficking and legitimizes a carceral approach. UN Women ROAP constructs victim subjects through the anti-trafficking discourse that promotes criminal justice while constituting neoliberal entrepreneur subjects through women’s economic empowerment discourse. This depoliticizes the international division of gendered and racialized labour and forms relations of complicity with the paternalistic masculinity of the Thai government. Lastly, drawing upon the universal human rights discourse, NGOs construct victim subjects that function as an indicator of the Thai government’s “backwardness” and survivor subjects that function as a reflection of liberal feminism’s women empowerment discourse. To achieve this, NGOs criticize the despotic masculinity of the Thai government and suggest that the Western and international community should serve as the “civilized” guidance. By examining the discursive effects of the dominant development discourses, this research illuminates how coloniality is constituted through a layered and nested gendered and racialized hierarchy and also sheds light on the dangers associated with how liberal development discourse reinforces masculinized institutional policies.