Gender, health, and labor in Thailand's medical hub

Abstract

As global economic and political conditions shift, Asian countries have placed technologies at the center of their development strategies, fostering new levels of wealth and expertise, but also generating new inequities. Among the most successful of these state-supported strategies have been efforts to develop and invest in new medical technologies, and recruit patients willing to travel across national borders for health care, in a process known as medical tourism. Medical tourism has afforded countries like Thailand greater wealth and prestige, and can also increase disparities for people in destination countries by encouraging specialized and privatized services catered towards wealthier patients. However, sparse research has focused on how these state strategies to promote medical tourism affect the health outcomes of people in destination countries, nor on the gendered labor that supports these state strategies. This article fills these gaps by analyzing medical tourism in Thailand as a gendered techno-development strategy, or a state-sponsored initiative which incorporates gendered labor and technologies, while also creating gendered health inequities. The article bridges a political economy approach to global health with gendered analyses of health and labor. The analysis draws on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand, conducted in 2016 and 2017–2018, and in-depth interviews with 62 participants. It illuminates the gendered labor relations that help foster state development strategies such as medical tourism, as well as gendered health outcomes for people in a destination country.