‘I shouldn’t have to do this alone’: intersectional livelihoods and single Hmong women in Thailand

Abstract

Feminist livelihood literature has demonstrated the centrality of gender and other forms of social difference in defining the experiences of making a living. However, to date critical livelihood analysis that goes beyond male-female gendered disaggregation remains quite rare. To address this, I advance a decolonial intersectional approach to demonstrate how livelihoods are produced by the compounding experiences of gender, ethnicity, marital status, and generation. Drawing on fieldwork in an ethnic minority Hmong village in northern Thailand, I present ethnographic case studies to analyze the experiences of four Hmong women who, for different reasons, undertake their livelihoods independently from a male counterpart. These women’s experiences demonstrate important intergenerational shifts occurring in Hmong society in Thailand and changing expectations of women’s roles, with one woman widowed, one divorced, one unmarried, and one’s husband in jail. Moreover, a decolonial intersectional livelihood approach demonstrates how these women’s self-identity as Hmong cannot be separated from their gendered positionalities, and how their livelihoods without a male counterpart often render them marginalized from a unitary category of ‘Hmong women’. By examining a group of Hmong women’s differentiated lived experiences, this paper contributes to feminist livelihood literature beyond traditional male-female analyses, addressing a lack of empirical intersectional studies, while simultaneously reporting gendered intergenerational change in this Hmong village. A decolonial intersectional approach to livelihoods requires close attention to productive and reproductive activities, relationality, plural knowledges, as well as embodied experiences of identity-formation.