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

This article studies a specific form of transnational living that results from Thai – Western cross-border marriage migration: Thai women's experiences of intercultural partnerships with a Western man. The study is explicitly from a Thai female partner's perspective. It unpacks women's experiences and perceptions of living this life from their own accounts. We refer to their experiences and perceptions of living this form of transnational life as unintended transnationalism , that is, that living a life defined by dependent gendered intercultural exchanges with a foreign man was a by-product, not an aspiration of her strategy for a better life. Living ‘ unintended transnationalism ’ refers to how women negotiate the specific high challenges and sociocultural pressures arising from dependency on a foreign man, who largely decides where, when and how you live. Women face strong acculturation pressures to adapt to their husbands' Western cultural needs, on his terms, even when they share a home in Thailand — a process we define as imported assimilationism . The study shows how her experiences of transnational living are importantly shaped by her: access to rights, cultural differences with her partner, and positioning in social space and place in Thailand, over this life journey. It draws from 20 biographical interviews with women in partnerships (between 7 and 30 years) with Westerners, currently resident in Thailand. Overall, we find that living ‘ unintended transnationalism ’ is a challenging life, even for women who make significant material gains. It can lead to isolation, dissociation from family, and dissimilation from belonging in Thailand.

structures, gender and family relations in rural regions, while Thaiforeigner couples are increasingly visible in Western cities and Thailand. Thai-Western partnerships are predominantly between Thai women and older men. Today, some partnerships have endured more than a quarter of a century. This article studies the specific form of 'transnational living' that results from Thai-Western cross-border marriage migration, from a Thai female partner's perspective, by unpacking women's experiences and perceptions of living this life over years from their own accounts.
It is important to see the rapid growth of Thai-Western partnerships against the backdrop of deep social, economic and cultural cross-border connections that reproduces transnational dependent exchanges and asymmetric power relations between Thailand and 'the West' (Statham, Scuzzarello, Sunanta, & Trupp, 2020). Notwithstanding some limitations, one relevant insight of Guarnizo's (2003) innovative formulation for 'transnational living' was precisely the need to link personal subjective experiences within the deeper structural socio-economic context of transnational connections that underpin them. 1 The Thai-Western social relationships discussed here are forms of 'transnational living' that produce, and are reproduced by, the specific globalisation processes linked to Thailand's rapid economic development, of which mobility and migration are important drivers. This links them to globalisation processes that are core to influential transnational perspectives on migrants' lives (among many, see e.g., Levitt, 2001). They could not exist without the many (often invisible) cross-border connections that are relatively accessible in contemporary life-affordable long-distance travel, mobile phones, chat apps, internet dating and easy international money transfersand serve Thailand's massive foreign population of short-stay tourists.
At the same time, the growing internal rural to urban female migration that has been core to Thailand's economic boom has produced a generation of women willing to move to support their families back in the village. Meanwhile Western societies have produced significant numbers of older single men, divorced or alienated from their own families. Some men with disposable incomes in later life that go much further in Thailand try to make their 'holiday romances' into more permanent living arrangements.
This study is explicitly from a women's perspective, as the materially dependent, and often subservient partner in the relationship, from the poorer region. 2 It builds on earlier research on how the 'narrative arc' of a Thai-Western partnership evolves over years shaping a woman's life opportunities and well-being (Statham, 2020a(Statham, , 2020b. Findings showed the type of gendered negotiated exchanges that sustain these relationships are defined by highly asymmetric power relations, where a woman has to invest by supplying intimate (sex and care) services to her partner in exchange for material support.
She has to 'perform' to cater to his intimacy needs, defined by him on his terms, providing 'love', romance, sexual prestige, status among male peers, companionship or eldercare services, often starting out from a position of acute material need and dependency. Such gendered negotiated exchanges constitute new forms of transnational patriarchy, where a woman submits to a man in particular with regard to rights over her reproductive capacity and sexuality, and more generally his authority, in exchange for protection, subsistence, goods, material wealth or other resources (Jongwilaiwan & Thompson, 2013).
Living a life defined by cross-border connections, mobility and dependent gendered (material, sociocultural and intimate) exchanges with a foreigner was seldom a woman's aspiration at the outset. It is largely an unintended by-product of her initial strategy to secure a better life by marrying a wealthy Westerner. Women often experience the challenges of their transnational living over time as unintended outcomes of a decision made years ago. I call this living unintended transnationalism. Their decisions to marry Westerners were 'choices' only in a very limited sense, because they were decisions made within the strong structural constraints and social and family pressures that confront rural women, who typically face hardships, divorce or life crises. Of course, living in another country or becoming transnational in outlook can be 'unintended' in a straightforward sense. However, by living 'unintended transnationalism', we refer to how women try to cope and negotiate the specific challenging life experiences and sociocultural pressures that arise from living in dependency on a foreign man, from another culture and religion. He largely decides where, when and how you live. Also women face strong acculturation pressures to adapt to their husbands' Western cultural needs, on his terms, even when they share a home in Thailand-a process we define as imported assimilationism. The radical transformations women experience on this life journey is beyond anything that could have been imagined or predicted beforehand (Statham, 2020a). Many did not set out to become what Keyes (2014) calls 'village cosmopolitans': people who retain an attachment to their rural home, but whose worldviews have been significantly shaped by experiences beyond the village, often by emigration or mixing with foreigners.
Living this 'unintended transnationalism' can be a source of significant existential psychological stressors that accumulate over years. It can be a difficult life. She faces important challenges: to her sense of individual identity and belonging; to her well-being, as she lives in intimate proximity in a dependent relationship on an (older) foreign man from a different culture; to her emotional bonds and relations to her natal family; and to her status and place 'fitting in' Thai society. At the same time, she faces very high contextual barriers, and material and social costs, if she wants to 'exit'. This places strong social pressures on her to make this new life work for her husband, her natal family and finally for her. In contrast to a normative bias that was present especially in early transnational perspectives (e.g., Levitt, 2001) emphasising the relative ease of living 'here' and 'there', we look at how women experience the unexpected costs and benefits of this challenging transnationalised life journey. Waldinger (2017) argues that many contributions on transnationalism have a normative bias and overemphasise transnational social connectivity over the political restrictions that states place on mobility and noncitizens, and that this leads them to overstate the apparent ease for migrants of coping with living 'here' and 'there'. For example, Levitt's (2001, pp. 8-9) seminal definition sees a transnational social field as a 'border-spanning arena that enables migrants, if they choose, to remain active in both worlds'. Leaving aside general theoretical disputes, I consider that opportunities for transnational living are highly context dependent. Specific cases will be importantly shaped by the interaction of receiving states' restrictions on mobility and stratification of life chances for noncitizens, on one side, and migrants' capacity for transnational social agency through cross-border connections, on the other. For Thai female marriage migrants, who are resource weak and highly dependent, face high barriers in moving and postmigration living abroad, and difficulties of 'imported assimilationism' when setting up home with a Westerner in Thailand, we expect transnational living to be very socially and culturally challenging both 'here' and 'there'.
The original data is from 20 biographical semistructured interviews with women in partnerships with Westerners, for between seven and 30 years (mean 13.7 years). Today, these women reside with their partners permanently, or most of the year, in Thailand. This is because one aim of the study is to examine the impact of transnational living on her status, relations and place in Thai society. Nonetheless, the sample includes women who lived many years abroad, who move backwards and forwards within a year, who plan to emigrate abroad imminently and a few who never left.
The next section outlines a perspective on transnational living resulting from cross-border marriage, by presenting an analytic framework for studying the women's experiences by their access to rights, cultural differences, and location in social space and place. After discussing methods and the sample, subsequent sections present the empirical study: opportunities for transnational living; 'imported assimilation' in personal relations; and remaking 'home' in Thailand. The final discussion re-evaluates living 'unintended transnationalism' by examining how rights, home life with a foreigner, and family and social relations, importantly shape her individual life experiences, well-being and 'where' and 'how' she fits into Thai society after this journey.

| TRANSNATIONAL LIVING AFTER CROSS-BORDER MARRIAGE
Cross-border marriages are forms of transnational living that connect people through mobility across nation-state borders and produce new intercultural and interethnic familial relations. Such transnational living is deeply inscribed by the social conditions of global inequality and gender relations that produce them (Fresnoza-Flot, 2017). Constable's (2005Constable's ( , 2009 general perspective is influential. She draws from feminist insights on 'gendered geographies of power' (Mahler & Pessar, 2001) to define cross-border marriages as 'global marriagescapes'. She argues that the global intersections of gender, class, ethnic and national inequalities lead to individual aspirations that produce migration flows between people from richer and poorer countries who marry (Constable, 2005, p. 5). Like many, she moves away from explanations of economic motivations, to emphasise intimacy, emotions and culture, as reasons why individuals move and marry: 'Recent marriage-scapes both reflect and are propelled by fantasies and imaginings about gender, sexuality, tradition, and modernity' (Constable, 2005, p. 7). Nonetheless, she emphasises the 'commodification' of intimacy and caregiving by women in marital and family relations (Constable, 2009). In similar frameworks, a large number of case studies exist on transnational partnerships resulting from cross-border marriage. 3 Typically, these examine the gendered material, intimate and care exchanges between individual women and men in a partnership, in relation to, first, the intersecting inequalities and asymmetric power relations in which they are socially embedded, and second, the lived experiences, emotions, well-being and socioeconomic outcomes (e.g., 'hypergamy') for a female partner from a poorer country.
This contribution advances three factors within a Thai woman's gendered negotiated exchanges with a Western man that shape transnational living experiences and outcomes: rights, cultural difference and social space and place.
First, in a world dominated by restrictive state immigration and citizenship regimes, it is important to account for the limiting effects of receiving states on mobilities, migration pathways and postmigration life chances (Statham et al., 2020;Waldinger, 2017).
Restrictions are very high for people from the Global South. This is especially clear for Thai wives moving West, who have to prove the 'validity' of their marriage to enter in the first place. But it applies to Westerners who try to live (semi-)permanently in Thailand, confronted by the Thai state's restrictions on foreigners. Many Thai-Western social relationships seemingly occur 'bottom-up', outside the domain of state authority, as a result of individual decisions. This viewpoint is reinforced by marriage migration perspectives, especially Constable's (2005), that focus on individual personal stories. Discussions of rights granted by sending and receiving states are surprisingly absent from many cross-border marriage studies on Thailand (e.g., Lapanun, 2019) and Asia (for a rare early exception, see Piper & Roces, 2003). Such approaches fail to acknowledge sufficiently how states shape the social and political conditions that facilitate/hinder mobility for each partner, and their life chances as foreign emigrants abroad, or partners of foreign immigrants in Thailand. If two individuals from different parts of the globe meet by internet dating, or casual sexual encounters in 'holiday romances', there appears to be no state intervention. After all, liberal states do not tell people with whom they can have intimate relations or marry. However, as soon as people try to live in the same place and settle together, it is clear that opportunities for transnational living are strongly determined by the access to rights-immigration and long-term settlement requirementsthat receiving states place on a foreign spouse. How receiving states' grant rights to entry, residence, property and access to social welfare matters a great deal for the life chances, security and well-being for Thais in the West and Westerners in Thailand.
A second factor that importantly shapes a Thai woman's transnational living experiences derives from her strong cultural differences from her partner. Notwithstanding Thailand's globalisation, very strong differences remain between Thai and Western cultures on core norms and values, gender relations, religion, family obligations, sexual mores and relations between individuals and community (Van Esterik, 2000). In Thai-Western intercultural marriages these cultural differences are negotiated within interpersonal exchanges that are defined by power asymmetry and her dependence on him. 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. Living this imported assimilationism on a daily basis at 'home', performing for a man on his terms, in his language, in his social setting, cooking and eating his food, can present significant challenges to individual identity and belonging leading to feelings of isolation. Western husbands are often transitioning sex tourists (Lafferty & Maher, 2020;Thompson, Kitiarsa, & Smutkupt, 2016).
Whether sharing a home abroad, or in Thailand, Thai women can face 'neo-colonial' Western male imaginaries of superiority, that is, that they are hyperfeminine, exotic, sexually submissive, docile and willing to provide intimate and care services. Such discriminatory stereotypes operate as 'social facts' shaping how Westerners (including husbands) treat them. At the same time, her cultural engagement with a 'Western' way of life can lead to less acceptance by Thais and a relative estrangement from her homeland.
A third factor that shapes transnational living is her belonging to and location in social space and place. This is where her life journey after marriage leaves her in relation to, first, her social relationships with Thai 'significant others', especially family and friends, and second, her status in Thai society and the 'place' she is located. Here, we draw insights from 'linked-lives' perspectives on how individual relationships within a family, and the role of 'significant others' from extended family kinship networks (e.g., Kou, Mulder, & Bailey, 2017), shape decisions. Also pertinent are perspectives on 'home' and family that identify the social imaginary and emotional, as well as material and resource-based aspects of a migrant's 'home' experiences (e.g., Boccagni, 2017). As 'dutiful daughters', Thai women face strong social pressures and cultural obligations of familial piety to support parents and family located in the rural 'home' (Angeles & Sunanta, 2009).
These were often primary motivations to marry a foreigner. Once married, however, her social relationships with her natal family are transformed as she has to mediate between providing for her natal family and the demands of her partner (usually the source of provision).
Where does this leave her status in the family, and natal rural village, to which many Thai emigrants still identify strongly as their emotional 'home' (Rigg, 2019;Turner & Michaud, 2020)? Women who partner Westerners face strong stigmatisation in Thailand as 'prostitutes' that can make it hard to fit back into society, or gain upward social mobility, even if they become materially wealthy. This social and emotional distance from natal family and Thai social relations can be reinforced by living in a home that is physically located in city that caters for the 'expat' community. Does intercultural marriage increase her sociocultural distance and lead to segregation from Thai society?
Who does she socialise with in this life journey? How does she belong to her family, village and home country? She potentially ends up being neither 'here' nor 'there', but stuck somewhere in between.
In summary, this analytic framework studies three factors that shape her transnational living experiences and social and well-being outcomes: 1. Opportunities for transnational living: How decisions to marry, move and live with a foreigner are strongly shaped by access to rights that derive from one's own and a partner's nation-state 2. Imported assimilationism in personal relations: How cultural differences between partners are negotiated in everyday living together 3. Remaking 'home' in Thailand: How she belongs, socially fits into, and is re-located in Thailand by this life-journey (social space and place)

| METHOD AND SAMPLE
The original data are from 20 in-depth biographical interviews with Thai women (Table 1) selected from a larger sample of 40 interviews.
We include only women in partnerships for at least 7 years, because this allows sufficient time for 'transnational living'. Our interviewees reside in Thailand, at least for most of the year. They were recruited from two rural regions notable for Thai-Western partnerships, Udon Thani (11) and Phetchabun (5), while a few are from the tourist city Pattaya (2), and capital Bangkok (2), to add urban variation. All interviews were conducted between August 2016 and November 2017 by experienced Thai researchers, in Thai language, on location in Thailand. The interviews lasted at least one hour, some much longer. They were recorded, transcribed and professionally translated into English.
Interviews were open but semistructured in a way that encouraged respondents to recount key events in their life histories, through which they interpreted and evaluated their partnership. To analyse the interview material, first, we read the full transcripts several times.
From this we reconstructed a framework for studying 'transnational living' by looking at the negotiated exchanges between the couple in setting up home (rights), relations at home (cultural differences) and remaking home in Thailand (social space and place). We then coded the interviews by identifying these three aspects. This allowed us to work with the qualitative material on how a woman frames and evaluates her experiences of 'transnational living'. We were also able to compare the range of different experiences between respondents within each aspect of 'transnational living'. In this way, we are able to present our qualitative findings and quotes within an overall interpretive framework.  Cares for nephew who has lived with her since a baby.  Interviewer: How is your daily communication?
We just ask what we want to have for lunch or dinner.
Interviewer: Over 9 years-your life has been like that?
My friends also ask how I've spent my life with him just like that. We've never had a big argument even we spend almost 24 hours together every day. We don't have a small talk like other couples. (T) While some problems are cultural misunderstandings, others are gendered, when men assert their own patriarchal norms and values to exert their dominant power in the relationship at home. Differences in food tastes were common, with men often not accepting Thai cuisine and eating only Western food. However, the following case demonstrates how a man exerts his authority over food choices as part of his entitlement over her body and social control over her behaviour. A woman has internalised the complaints of her American husband and sees herself as unable to eat her own regional food in her own country: He cannot adapt himself to eat many Thai foods, espe- A couple's ability to sustain a relationship over the long-term depends on whether they can adapt their respective roles and exchanges to fit the changed circumstances. This requires a transformation of intimacy between them that acknowledges a woman's enhanced status in the partnership. Some men find this difficult, not least because the decision to live together was usually motivated by his self-interest or retirement plan, and strongly shaped by his patriarchal understandings.
One woman feels sufficiently empowered to take her Slovakian husband to a counsellor, after domestic conflicts resulting from his refusal to do housework. She challenges his assertion of patriarchal norms that he attributed to Thai-Western partnerships, that it is 'normal' for Thai women to 'serve' their husbands, a 'commodified' service he has paid for: We had to see a doctor to help us understanding each other. Since I feel that I do everything in the house while he does nothing, except sleeping and paying … I was told that he thought that he is the one who pays and he has seen from other Thai and foreign couples that foreigners do not have to do housework. (M) Another factor in cases of significant age gaps is differential ageing (Statham, 2020a)  This leads to estrangement. It is compounded by the stigmatisation of being a foreigner's wife in Thai culture that makes it hard even for materially successful women to enter higher echelons of society. A woman almost becomes a foreigner or a member of new social group in her native country. Their lives are akin to being 'immigrants in their own country' and similar to experiences of 'return migrants', even though some have never lived abroad. One reason 'Thai wives' bond together as a distinctive social group is that few others are in a position to understand the contradictions that shape this life-journey.
Often their friendship bonding is around how to cope with this life.
The women live relatively encapsulated in a social world of relationships that is a clean break from their earlier existence, to which there is no return.
Living as a foreigner's wife requires a separation between the public outside face shaped by a need to demonstrate material 'success' and the inner personal experience of bearing the hidden existential costs and hard work of sustaining this type of life. These women's lives are structured around trying to resolve this gap between public expectations and social pressures that derive from their 'foreigner's wife' status, on one side, and the private inner loneliness of becoming a relative stranger within one's own family and country, while facing the difficulties of living with an (older) Western man, on the other.