19 Gender, Masculinity, and Safety in the Changing Lao-Thai Migration Landscape

Abstract

Recent policy debates on migration in the Greater Mekong Subregion have put increasing emphasis on migrant safety, which has taken the form of opening legal channels of migration. Whereas the discourse on migrant safety revolves around gendered emphases in vulnerability, foregrounding female migrants’ vulnerability and muting male migrants’ vulnerability, policy interventions to make migration safer are too often framed as gender- neutral. In this chapter I focus on Lao employment agencies as a key technique in the management of Lao- Thai cross-border migration. I argue that employment agencies are embedded in a masculine policy landscape and I contest them as gender-neutral techniques by demonstrating how these agencies and the policy architecture in which they are situated produce significant degrees of male privilege when it comes to accessing supposedly safe forms of migration. Yet male privilege is limited, as migrating through these supposedly safe channels of migration may in fact increase male migrants’ vulnerability. However, I argue that young men’s motivations for migrating through these expensive legal channels can only in part be understood by looking at their material effects on migrant vulnerability. Instead, this practice should rather be interpreted as a modern version of the cultural style of hegemonic masculinity through which young men deal with protection from danger in the risky exercise of migration.

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