Contesting the margins of modernity: women, migration, and consumption in Thailand

Rural women who move to Bangkok for employment confront significant social and economic constraints as low-wage, low-status migrant labor; yet experiences of exploitation in the workplace are widely mediated by aspirations for and participation in new patterns of commodity consumption. In this article, I examine these consumption practices as important sites of cultural struggle in which young women seek to construct new identities and contest their marginalization within the wider society, albeit with conflicting and often ambivalent results. [consumption, discourses of modernity, rural-urban migration, gender, identity, Thailand]