The Impact of Stigma Following Migratory Marriage to the UK: Challenges to the Racialisation of the Thai Bride
摘要
This chapter explores the ‘Thai bride’ discourse and how it impacts Thai women in the UK. Thai women are a hard-to-reach group; this difficulty arises through the dispersal of women across the country after marriage, fostering (in)visibility. Narrative, from 12 in-depth semi-structured interviews, foregrounds the social and cultural barriers the women face, based on their intersecting identities of being Thai and female. The empirical study considers how women attempt to remove themselves from the racialisation of the ‘Thai bride’ that serves to marginalise the women socially. The findings highlight how such perceptions, fuelled by the sex tourism industry, perpetuate the Thai bride stereotype, underpinning sexual harassment, racial discrimination and isolation. This work foregrounds how intersecting identities constitute a complex form of gender-based violence.