‘You should never make a noise’: patriarchal confinement of displaced women from Myanmar in Thailand’s refugee-migrant labour regime

Information from the abstract

Since the 2021 military coup, displacement from Myanmar into Thailand has accelerated dramatically. Although many meet international criteria for refugeehood, those fleeing Myanmar are largely reconstituted as documented and undocumented migrant workers supplying labour to Thailand's low-wage economy. Drawing on interviews with advocates and service providers supporting displaced women from Myanmar, this paper examines how patriarchy, particularly violence, operates alongside Thailand's refugee–migrant labour regime to constrain women's lives. We bring the scholarship on confinement into conversation with feminism, showing how women’s lives are curtailed by the migrant-labour infrastructure and patriarchy. Together, these narrow the sociospatial and temporal terrain women inhabit. Women’s lives are shaped by inclusion and exclusion, hope and uncertainty, anticipation of harm, and narrowed horizons of possibility. Finally, because survival often depends on silence and endurance, these become defining features of women’s lived experience, reflecting a condition we conceptualise as patriarchal stuckness.

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Related topics: Asian Geopolitics and Ethnography · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies