Performing gender roles in homestay tourism: place-making and social change for Lahu Women in Northern Thailand

Abstract

This study focuses on place-making while integrating the concepts of feminist political economy and gender performance. This is to better understand how homestay tourism (CBT) in an ethnic Lahu community is gendered and with what political-economic implications. This research’s objectives are to: 1) examine the gender roles that Lahu women perform in homestay tourism; 2) examine the transforming of gender roles that are experienced among Lahu women, which are reproduced and contested in homestay tourism; and 3) explore the ways that Lahu women benefit or become challenged economically, socially, culturally, and politically by their participation in community-based tourism. This qualitative research is derived from eighteen months of fieldwork, mainly applying in-depth interviews, personal narratives, and participant observation techniques. Place-making in homestay tourism is interrelated among space, place, and gender; place is interrelated with the cultural construction of a ‘woman’ in gendered space. The home imbues a woman with the sense of a ‘woman’s place;’ it binds a woman with the experience of being a caring wife, mother, etc. This domestic ideology often creates gender inequality and oppression. This study addresses how CBT homestay tourism development has shaped women’s struggles to negotiate traditional gender roles, in the domestic and public spheres as well as in virtual (e.g., social media) spaces and places. Homestay tourism place-making, nowadays, overlaps with women’s roles in the public, domestic, and community spheres. As women now are playing primary roles in tourism management. They now have empowering connections with outsiders and more socio-economic status, including social and political empowerment. They are resultantly negotiating traditional gender roles, which are transforming, especially during high tourism season. However, women still cannot realize significant and autonomous family decision-making power. Moreover, women perform multiple gender identities (e.g., as mothers, wives, farmers, and homestay tourism entrepreneurs). They juggle a triple-burden struggle amid overlapping spheres: domestic-public-community place-making that is imbued with power relations related to negotiation, meaning, sense of place, and fluid relations. Homestay tourism, however, has transformed domestic activities into being value-work that is accepted by men and by overall society. Homestay tourism, by shifting non-market labor to market labor, hence blurs the line between the domestic and public spheres in terms of the social reproduction of gender roles. Thus, this study argues beyond the Feminist Political Economy argument that women are “double sex-blind” in the modes of production that lead to unpaid labor. Even women’s traditional roles as caretakers now can shift from being non-value work to value work in homestay tourism place-making. However, in terms of modes of production, women are still being challenged with experiencing exploitative labor. This phenomenon is based on their intersectionality (e.g., social class, ethnicity, and religion), which is the root of gender inequality.