Practising privilege. How settling in Thailand enables older Western migrants to enact privilege over local people

Abstract

This article provides an empirical account of how older Western migrants in Thailand (N: 20) negotiate, practice, and justify their privilege in Thai society to secure the 'good' life they are seeking through migration. We show that they justify their economic privilege relative to locals by describing it as unavoidable and accepted by Thais. They can also live a 'good' life because they benefit from global racialised hierarchies built on the illusion of their superiority vis-à-vis locals. Women and men seem to have distinct ways of enacting privilege. Women practice their privilege through the consumption for their own gratification of reconstructed and stereotypical understandings of Thai culture, cast as primitive, spiritual and authentic. Men, instead, practice privilege in the form of new-found masculinity, sexuality and status that ageing has deprived them of in Western societies. In both cases, their understandings of Thai society and culture are superficial or simply inaccurate. Their narrow and stereotypical views of Thailand rather serve to justify their individual projects for self-gratification, while at the same time allowing them to see themselves as morally superior to local people, but also to exploitative and racist Westerners.

New frontiers in international retirement migration

“…Here, several nationalities of retirees have been researched – British, German, Swedish and Japanese – and for a mix of relocation processes beyond the assumed ‘normal’ demographic unit of the retired couple. These modalities invoke the destination countries’ reputation for affordable, high-quality care; the mechanism of marriage migration, nearly always between older European men and much younger local women; and the arbitrage of a low cost of living in a warm climate, enhancing the purchasing power (for housing, food, medical care and other services) of what might be otherwise considered as modest pensions ( see inter alia Howard, 2008; Green, 2014; Ono, 2015; Wong and Musa, 2015; Horn et al ., 2016; Toyota, 2016; Botterill, 2017; Scuzzarello, 2020).…”

“…Obviously, this changes when one of the partners dies, so that single-person retiree households are also quite common – over a quarter in the same survey. The highly gendered phenomenon of older lone Japanese men who retire into seclusion in Thailand is described by Toyota (2016), as well as the privilege and power exerted by older Western men seeking younger Thai wives/partners/carers (Scuzzarello, 2020).…”

Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both-ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross-border connections between people, states, and places

“…We focus on the radical social and economic transformations of Thailand, an upper middle-income developing country 4 , that has built the stage and 'opportunity structures' for the increasing 'both-ways' migration pathways with the West. This background context makes life stories, like a Thai woman in her forties from the rural Northeast who discovers she has a life-threatening illness getting together with a retired low-income bus driver from Finland (Statham 2020), and a Swedish female later-life 'life-style' migrant to a remote Thai village, who sports a supposedly 'Buddhist' tattoo as a self-proclamation of the 'authenticity' her Thai life (see Scuzzarello 2020), appear normal features of social life rather than exceptional novelties. The individual choices that shaped these lives, and the surprising prevalence of lives like these in Thailand and abroad, needs to be understood within context as an outcome of the specific globalisation processes that have shaped Thailand through transnational links to other parts of the world over the last decades.…”

‘Unintended transnationalism’: The challenging lives of Thai women who partner Western men

“…They define life together at ‘home’. Unlike immigrants to the West, most Western immigrant ‘expatriates’ feel little need to ‘acculturate’ towards Thailand and face few pressures to do so, living in tourist locations designed to cater for their needs as a foreign sojourner (Scuzzarello, 2020). While ‘acculturation’ and ‘cultural assimilation’ usually refers to how migrants from poorer countries adapt to the culture and values of so‐called ‘mainstream’ majority populations in their societies of settlement (see especially, the influential work of Alba and colleagues, e.g., Alba et al, 2018; Alba & Nee, 2003), Thai women face strong pressures to ‘acculturate’ to Western values when they live with Westerners in Thailand, because of his dominant position in the partnership.…”