Ethnicity, Class, Race, and Gender: Exploring Intersectionality in the Narratives of Thai Immigrant Wives of White U.S. Men

While the dominant U.S. discourse depicts heterosexual Thai immigrant wives as sexualized women motivated to out-marry white U.S. men to increase their economic status, feminist scholars challenge this discourse by casting non-Western women who participated in cross-racial international marriages with white Western men as strategically engaging white hegemonic masculinity to resist the so-called “ethnic masculinity.” This study considers the shortcomings of these discourses and employs the intersectionality framework to examine how the interplay between race, class, ethnicity, and gender inform women’s choices to engage in cross-racial international heterosexual marriages. The data for this study includes interviews of 38 Thai immigrant heterosexual wives from different social classes and ethnic backgrounds (e.g., Thai, Isan-Thai, and Chinese-Thai). This study examines how the resistance of one form of oppression (e.g., gender) can rely on the perpetuation of other forms of oppression (like racism and class).Chapter 3 examines how Thai wives construct the racialized masculinities of Thai and white U.S. men and the ways that they utilized those constructions in their marriages with white U.S. men. The findings suggest that scholars should not quickly interpret cross-racial international marriage as a strategy that Thai women employ to resist gender oppression of their homeland or coethnic men, especially when their perceptions are informed by oppressive racial ideologies that denigrate coethnic men as inferior to white Western men. Chapter 4 explores the gendered and racial stereotypes that Thai immigrant wives encounter in their everyday interactions with other people in the U.S. and in Thailand when they were visiting home. Chapter 5 examines the strategies that Thai wives engage in coping and responding to stereotypes placed upon them by the dominant discourses. The findings illustrate the powerful interplay of systems of oppression based on gender, race, and class. I argued that Thai wives constructed their versions of racialized femininity to challenge the negative stereotypes made about them in relation to the stereotype of white Western women. However, their constructions of femininity can uphold and perpetuate the traditional gender arrangements and belief in racial/ethnic essentialism at the same time.